


all that you love will be carried away

by coldhope



Series: all that you love will be carried away [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Evil Space Boyfriends, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-17
Updated: 2016-01-28
Packaged: 2018-05-14 10:55:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 32,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5741020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/pseuds/coldhope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Supreme Leader, the oscillator is failing. The collapse has begun. There is nothing that can be done.</i>
</p><p>Hux, sent to retrieve Kylo Ren from the dying Starkiller Base, has lost almost everything, and has little patience or tolerance left for anyone or anything--particularly not Snoke's pet pseudo-Sith and his amateur theatrics. But you do the job that is in front of you, to the best of your ability, and you hold on as long as you can.</p><p>Now with illustrations by <a href="http://givenclarity.tumblr.com/">givenclarity</a>!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Все, что ты любил когда-то, ветром унесет](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6070176) by [La_Signorina_Verdi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/La_Signorina_Verdi/pseuds/La_Signorina_Verdi)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> illustrated by [kassna](http://kassna.tumblr.com/)!

In stories, the killing blow is painless. At least at first, when the nerve endings are numbed with shock; later the pain may come in a flood too vast and comprehensive to describe, whose only merciful quality is the fact that it is brief. 

General Hux, watching from the shuttle as the planet beneath them shuddered in its death throes, was waiting for the pain. 

A day ago he had stood before the massed ranks of the First Order, in the moment he had been working for ever since he could remember, the fate of worlds resting in his hands, and given the order to fire the superweapon--and part of him had lit up almost as brightly as the scarlet fire tearing up the sky. A day ago he had tasted triumph, and now he could see through the shuttle’s viewport that great ravines were opening in the snowy terrain as Starkiller Base began to tear itself, and everything Hux had worked for, apart--and he felt numb. 

_Supreme Leader, the oscillator is failing. The collapse has begun. There is nothing that can be done._

The words should have tasted bitter as aloes, bitter as ashes in his mouth-- _I have failed you_ \--but he had felt nothing other than a vague irritation that so much work, so much expense, so many forms filled out and supply chains managed and rotas organized, so much effort and so much time had been wasted. Years ago in the Academy he had seen a line of graffiti scrawled in a refresher stall that had stuck with him for its sheer unexpected poetry in such a setting: _All that you love will be carried away._ The line came back to him now, as they sped over the snow, over the cracks appearing in his planet’s hide. Hux did not love anything, except perhaps the abstract concept of achievement, of duty fulfilled, but even that was being borne away from him as the world began to die.

 _You will leave Starkiller at once and come to me with Kylo Ren_ , Snoke had said. _It appears that he may have been right about the girl._

 _Girl or no girl_ , Hux thought, _he was wrong about practically everything else,_ and even as he watched the red dot of the tracking beacon on the screen in front of him, marking Ren’s position, the thought flickered through his mind of leaving this particular last duty undone. Of returning to Snoke empty-handed. _We were unable to locate Lord Ren in time, Supreme Leader. It is doubtless that he perished with the implosion of the planet._ That would be one good thing about this whole unimaginable foul-up, the thought of never again having to deal with Ren’s tantrums or the damage he so enjoyed causing to bits of expensive equipment. Never having to hear that voice, slick with disdain even through the mask’s modulator, or put up with the amateur theatrics of that idiotic, unstable weapon. The lightsaber did not so much irritate Hux as _offend_ him. 

“There he is, sir,” said one of the troopers. “He’s--he’s down.”

Hux’s fingers tightened on the back of the seat. Kylo Ren was nothing more than a featureless blot of blackness against the snow, but even from this height they could see a smear of red staining the white surrounding him. 

“Take us in,” he said, and he did not recognize his own voice.

The cold bit through his uniform, through his greatcoat, as he hurried down the shuttle’s ramp and out into the snow. The ground was shaking in great unpredictable heaves, trying to tip him off his feet, like the deck of a ship in turbulence, and there was a sharp nose-tingling smell of ozone in the air, over the acidic tang of snow. Hux was aware of all of this through the numbness, as if it were beginning to thin and tear apart under strain, and he wondered how he would bear it when the full weight of this disaster had made itself real to him. Everything seemed to be happening very slowly, cold and clear, but he still could not quite feel the pain. 

Ren was lying in a patch of bloody snow marked with the signs of footprints, of a battle. His mask was nowhere to be seen, and the slack closed face turned up to the sky had no color in it at all other than the ugly slash across his forehead and down one cheek. Snowflakes starred the blackness of his hair. 

_It is doubtless that he perished with the implosion of the planet_ , Hux heard himself say again, inside his head, and knelt down beside the body of his co-commander, suddenly furious. How _dare_ Ren look so human, now? How dare he lie there all white and black and red with something approaching _peace_ on his unacceptably young and vulnerable face, when everything Hux had worked for was dying all around him?

“No,” he said, out loud, and did not care if the troopers who had gathered around them gave him an uncertain glance. Hux stripped off one black glove--his exposed fingers hurt sharply with the cold, beginning to go numb almost immediately, and he had time to wonder just how long Ren had been lying here in this bitter temperature--and felt for a pulse. Faint and thready, but there. 

He nodded at the troopers, who had brought a stretcher, and followed them as they carried Ren back to the ship. Blood spotted the snow. That was Hux’s last image of Starkiller Base: blood, slow and appallingly dark, amid the endless whirling whiteness of the snow.

 

~

 

It was a long way back to the _Finalizer_ , especially since one of the transport’s sublight engines decided to quit on them, and Hux had time to think--a luxury which he did not appreciate. When a trooper disturbed him with news of their passenger, he welcomed the interruption. To an extent. 

“He’s _what_?”

“Refusing to cooperate, sir. The medical droid requests that you try to reason with him.”

Hux closed his mouth with a snap and stood up. That was Ren all over: stupidly, inconveniently, counterproductively dramatic. On the one hand he supposed it was good that Ren was capable of consciousness in the first place, but Hux could have done without this wrinkle. 

The words he had been about to say died half-formed as soon as he got a good look at Kylo Ren. In the lights of the transport’s tiny medbay the blood was shockingly bright, and there seemed to be much too much of it, much more than there should be. The ship’s single medical droid was red to its elbows. It looked up as Hux stood in the doorway, and he was tired enough to imagine he saw relief in its optics. “General, sir,” it said. “Thank you for coming. I simply must insist that Lord Ren allow me to sedate him, his injuries are severe and the work I must do to stabilize him is impossible without analgesia.”

On the bunk Kylo Ren was a very nasty shade of shiny pale grey everywhere he wasn’t covered in blood. Apart from the facial wound, something significant had hit him in the side; under the blood a vivid bruise stained most of his ribcage and the exposed tissue looked unpleasantly pulpy. _No lightsaber did that, or even a blaster_ , Hux thought. _That looks like a bowcaster’s quarrel wound._ He remembered the Wookiee, Solo’s companion, and wondered how the hell someone without the Force could have got far enough past Ren’s guard to make that shot. He didn’t like Ren, but he could respect the man’s abilities, when they weren’t standing directly in his way. 

Hux looked down at him. He was breathing in ragged rapid gasps through his clenched teeth, face slick with pain-sweat. Ren’s eyes were dark, but not so dark he couldn’t tell how hugely dilated they were, wide and shocky. _How he must hate being seen like this_ , Hux thought, aware that he himself was nearing the stage of exhaustion when serious mistakes began to be made; he wondered vaguely if he had ever been this tired in his life, or if it were possible to _be_ this tired and still be walking. He had actually taken off his uniform tunic before the trooper had come to fetch him, and now stood there staring down at Ren in just his shirtsleeves. His hair needed combing. Everything was broken and everything was ruined, and his hair needed combing, and here was Snoke’s pet Sith being _stupid_.

“Stop it,” he said out loud. 

It sounded much harsher than he had intended, and he was a little amazed to notice that Kylo Ren actually flinched, staring up at him with an expression he could not read in those glittering eyes. Some of the sweat on Ren’s face wasn’t sweat at all, Hux realized, but tears. “Stop it,” he said again. 

“Stop...what?” Ren rasped, still staring at him with that unsettling expression. 

“Stop behaving like a _child_ ,” Hux said. “We get it, you’re terribly brave and pain means nothing to one who is strong in the Force, or _with_ the Force, or whatever it is. Now stop being an idiot and let the droid do its damn job, I have had a very long day and frankly, Lord Ren, I am not up to dealing with your theatrics just at the moment.”

Ren did a bit more staring. _He can’t be more than four or five years younger than me,_ Hux thought. _He looks barely out of his teens. I can see why he wears that stupid mask_ , and a moment later an even more unwelcome thought followed: _I wear mine, don’t I?_

He was saved from having to look at that one very closely by Ren’s voice, unsteady and strengthless. “You think...this is...theatrics?” 

“When have you ever given me a reason to suspect otherwise?” Hux snapped. 

Ren shut his eyes for a moment, opened them again. The blackness of his eyebrows and eyelashes stood out starkly against the grey pallor. Hux tried not to notice that the lashes were wet with tears, drawn together into heavy points. “You make...a valid point, General,” Ren said, and while Hux was still trying to assimilate that, he added “You came back for me.”

“I had orders,” Hux said. “Here’s another one: stop being stubborn and let the bloody droid shoot you full of sophamine, nobody is impressed.”

“Actually, General, sir, sophamine and its related narcotics are counterindicated in this case--”

“When I want your opinion I will ask for it,” he said, almost dizzy with exhaustion, and the droid shut up. “Well?” 

“I _can’t_ ,” Kylo Ren rasped, looking as if he were about to be sick. “Okay? I _can’t_ have the drugs. They don’t...go together well with the Force. I can’t...lose control. Not on a ship this small.”

It was Hux’s turn to stare. Faint hectic color appeared for a moment high on Ren’s cheekbones and faded again, and he closed his eyes; Hux could see their darkness through the delicate skin of his eyelids. Something about that, about the utter lack of Ren’s usual haughty superiority, washed through him and put out the heat of anger, taking with it most of Hux’s remaining drive to stay upright with his eyes open. Abruptly he dropped into the chair beside the bunk, startling both the droid and Kylo Ren, and ran his hands through his hair--completing its disarray. 

“Fine,” he said. 

“...What?”

“Okay, fine, no drugs. But you need something.”

Hux had no idea where in his mind the suggestion came from, somewhere unbidden and unexamined; but he was too tired and too worn and too miserable to question it very much before reaching out and taking Kylo Ren’s hand in his. 

Ren froze, staring at him harder than ever, and then looked down at their hands. His skin was hot, slick with sweat, and Hux’s was cool and dry. After the first moment of shock, his fingers closed around Hux’s with panicky tightness, hard enough to hurt, hard enough to make Hux draw in his breath with a stifled curse. With the contact came an intense, disorienting sensation of mingled fear and panic and desperation, and he realized he was feeling an echo of Ren’s emotions. He set his jaw and held on despite the pain and the dizzying awareness of being in two heads at once, and thought as hard as he could _hang on_.

Ren’s hand tightened further, and he could feel the bones of his fingers grind together, but he didn’t move, and after a moment a thought came into his head that was not his own: _I’ll try._

 _Don’t try, do,_ he told Ren, and closed his eyes. A moment later he heard the droid’s manipulators click back into action, and the echo of pain made him grit his teeth, but he held on. 

He held on, and somewhere along the line he stopped being aware of very much other than Kylo Ren’s hand in his and the need to go on taking one breath after the other. Time dilated, lost meaning. Hux had no idea how long it had been when someone calling his name finally broke through the haze. 

“--ux? General Hux? Sir?”

He blinked and found the little medbay full of people--more droids, and troopers, and men and women in the blue-edged uniform of the _Finalizer_ ’s medical personnel. “General Hux?” one of the women said. “It’s all right. You can let go now. We need to take Lord Ren.”

Ren was apparently unconscious, or nearly; he lay on the bunk beneath a silver shock blanket, the wounds hidden under dressings. “What…” Hux began, dazed with fatigue. 

“We’re on the _Finalizer_ , sir,” said a trooper. “We got back. We’re safe.”

He tried to make his hand uncurl, but it wouldn’t obey him. “Can…”

It was nice that he didn’t have to finish the thought, because he wasn’t sure he could string words together coherently just at the moment. Two of the medbay officers gently but firmly unpeeled Kylo Ren’s fingers from his own, and Hux gasped in pain he couldn’t conceal. Red bruises were already beginning to darken on his hand where Ren had been holding on, and the hand itself felt stiff and frozen. “You should have that seen to, sir,” someone said. He paid no attention.

It took Hux an embarrassingly long time to realize they were waiting for him to move out of the way before they transferred Ren to the stretcher, and he had to hold on to the back of the chair when his legs didn’t seem to want to support him. He watched as Ren, limp and insensible, was wheeled away, and it wasn’t until he had been escorted to his own quarters and was trying to decide if he could face the task of taking off his clothes before lying down on the bed that he realized what felt so different: it was the silence of being once again alone inside his own head. It was like the numbness that had enveloped him ever since the inevitable fate of Starkiller Base had become evident, only this numbness was smaller and more specific. 

On the whole, General Hux thought, even as he fell headlong into sleep, he had preferred the pain.

~

_In stories, the killing blow is painless. At least at first, when the nerve endings are numbed with shock; later the pain may come in a flood too vast and comprehensive to describe, whose only merciful quality is the fact that it is brief._

illustration by [kassna](http://kassna.tumblr.com/)


	2. Chapter 2

Cold in and of itself was an absence, not a presence. Cold represented a lack of energy, a thing not given, a withholding; it was not a physical substance one could hold or carry. Hux knew that perfectly well, had been top of his classes in physics as well as astrophysics, knew about enthalpy and entropy, the measure of the degree of a system’s disorder; but to him, especially these years on Starkiller Base and the corridors of the _Finalizer_ , coldness had always seemed to be something like a parasite, a creature that crept into the gaps between the osteons of your bones, and made its home there. 

It was insidious, cold. You might not even really notice it, like deepening twilight, until it had begun to numb your nose-tip, your toes; then the shaking would start, your skin stinging with goosebumps, each hair standing out in an idiot mindless attempt to trap heat and conserve it. Being cold was not painful, exactly, but it was _disheartening_ in a way Hux had come to know very well throughout his life. 

Many of the First Order’s people had come from ice worlds, and to them the bone-aching cold of space was an expected and familiar thing, but Hux had never mastered the knack of not minding it, and even in the privacy of his quarters he wore his shirt and tunic done all the way up, his gloves, sometimes even the stupid hat, and more often than not had his greatcoat draped over his shoulders. He could have set his quarters’ ECS to a more pleasant temperature than that of the ship, or the base, in general, but doing so would have been an admission. Hux did not enjoy admitting things. So he wore his gloves, and his coat, and ignored the prickle of his skin trying to obey ancient mammalian programming, and went about his business. 

Everybody expected that, now. Seeing General Hux without all his layers would have been sufficiently out-of-the-ordinary to spark notice, among the brighter of the people watching. He was particularly grateful for that, right now. There were several reasons he did not want to take off his gloves, and the chill of the _Finalizer_ ’s processed atmosphere was only one of them. 

They were running on sublight propulsion alone, which was why, three days after the cataclysm, they were still within sight of the new little sunlet that had once been Hux’s assignment. In its birth agonies the tiny sun had given off an intense and broad-spectrum burst of radiation, some of which had been powerful enough in the right frequencies to jolt a lot of their systems offline. The majority of these had been repaired within several hours, but at least three of the port hyperdrive motivator core-shield labyrinths were showing signs of potential fatigue cracks. The escaping Resistance ships had had speed and smaller size on their side, but the _Finalizer_ ’s sheer bulk had offered a significant bremsstrahlung target to the high-energy particles thrown off by the imploding quintessence containment structure.

Engineering had told Hux that it was _probably_ safe to use the drive under these conditions. _Probably_. He’d asked for the odds, and when after some intense calculation they had been provided, he had looked from his console to the still-brilliant spot of the galaxy’s newest sun shining through the viewports and shivered inside the layers of his uniform. 

He had not slept more than a few hours at a stretch since that initial collapse on regaining the safety of the _Finalizer_. Waking from five hours of blank unconsciousness with a headache that sent brilliant herringbones of light sliding sickeningly across the right side of his vision, Hux had grimly got on with the uncountable things that needed doing. His right hand was swollen, blotched dark with bruising, and he was very, very glad of his gloves, and gladder that no one would remark upon them. At least the headache was invisible; it refused to budge no matter how many salicylins he chewed, sinking into the bone that cradled his right eye, and after a little while it had begun to make him feel sick. 

He had not disgraced himself in front of anyone--at least so far--but he had not been able to keep much down beyond a handful of crackers now and then. He was running on a combination of adrenaline and the ship’s unspeakable coffee. There was too much to _do_ , too much to consider, too much that needed him there to at least acknowledge it being done, and he needed to be _seen_ \--and seen conscious and coherent, because if he was himself, if he was General Hux, then perhaps the entire bloody ship might be able to keep on being itself and not...think too hard about what had happened, or what it meant. Typing with one hand and two fingers, he had grimly kept on keeping on.

He had contacted Snoke on the second day, sparkles drifting at the edges of his vision that had nothing to do with the holoproj. _Why have you not brought Ren to me, General? What is the explanation for this delay?_

_Supreme Leader, when the planet blew it damaged our hyperdrive core shields. Engineering calculates a 79.833 percent chance that superluminal flight could be achieved safely, but given our recent losses I determined that to be too risky. I will not lose more men to a mistake._

_Your consideration is commendable_ , Snoke had said, and there had been a nasty edge to the words that Hux barely even minded. _Nevertheless, I require Kylo Ren. Transfer him to a ship that works and bring him to me._

 _My apologies, Supreme Leader, but Ren cannot be moved in his condition. He is severely injured and Medical informs me that he may be unable to control his...powers...at the moment, and that the consequences should he unconsciously lash out aboard a small transport craft would be significant. The_ Finalizer _is sufficiently large and robust to survive any such...activity. I have my best men working on the hyperdrive core shields. We should be able to proceed within two days at most._

Hux hadn’t really been able to make out details through the sliding sparkles of his headache, and in any case the Supreme Leader made a point to have the light source always behind him, casting his features into shadow, but he thought the misshapen mouth had twisted a little. 

_Very well_ , Snoke had said, with a dismissive gesture. _I will allow Ren to lick his wounds a little longer, while you return my ship to functionality._

Hux had bowed, wondering if you could actually feel your brain banging into the sides of your skull as you moved, and wondering more if he would be able to reach the safety of somewhere private sometime fairly soon, as the nausea was climbing up his throat once again. Rising from the bow, he had turned to leave the presence, and was caught halfway out of the chamber by Snoke’s voice--now hissing, sharp-edged, venomous: _And, General, I would suggest that you bring whatever means are necessary to bear upon this operation. This is an order I recommend you expedite_.

 _Understood, Supreme Leader_ , he had said, with another bow, and only just managed to make it to the nearest ‘fresher before the inevitable occurred, unspeakably grateful to find himself alone. 

That had been...hours ago. Hours? Days. A day. He was losing time. Now, back on the bridge, he had a couple of hours yet to go before his day was nominally over, and while his gloves hid his right hand, they did not quite hide that it was swollen enough to pull the glove-seams tight, or that he wasn’t using it more than he could absolutely help. One of the fingers hurt much too much to use, and the other three were only a little better. 

_It doesn’t matter_ , Hux said to himself, _it doesn’t matter, because there are things that need doing and I can do them with one hand, and that is all there is to it_. Snoke had said that he, Hux, was to return with Ren, and he honestly did not know what would await him at the Supreme Leader’s pleasure. He’d been taken aback by Snoke’s insistence that he reload the weapon to fire upon the entire Ileenium system, rather than simply the Resistance base, after such a magnificently effective demonstration of its power on the Hosnian system: it had struck him as...overkill, unnecessary expenditure of energy for a result not significantly better than that which could be achieved with different tactics, and he remembered Snoke insisting. Commanding. Hux wondered vaguely, through the pain, through the sickness and exhaustion, if Snoke had some particularly effective punishment in mind for him when they finally arrived. 

He was imagining what they might be, these effective punishments, and it took an officer a few attempts to get his attention. 

“--General? Sir?”

Hux jerked upright, unable to stop a wince as a bolt of pain from his hand met one flaring behind that eye socket. “What?”

“Sir...are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” he snapped, ice crackling from each syllable, and sat up straight behind the console. “What is it?”

“Medbay, sir. They’re requesting your presence.”

“Ren?” he asked. 

The officer nodded, anxiously. Hux hadn’t been down to see Kylo Ren since their arrival. He knew what he would see, could imagine it much more clearly than he really wanted to: Ren’s pallid long-limbed gangly body hanging in the pink glow of the bacta tank, the wounds dark and bruised, his mop of unnecessarily long hair drifting in the slow currents. Hux knew exactly what it would look like, that hair: no tiny gemmy bubbles, not after a few days of immersion, just pure unreflective black hanging in the fluid like seaweed. Like lace. 

He pushed away an image of the blackness of that hair starred with unmelting snowflakes as the ground shook and heaved. “What...what’s wrong?”

“They’re asking for you, sir. No details.”

Hux’s mouth tightened, and he got up, steadying himself on the console with the wrong hand; the resulting stab of pain almost took him by surprise, and he shoved all his control into keeping his face straight, even as most of the color drained from it. “Thank you. That will be all.”

 _You will walk straight_ , he told himself. _You will walk straight and evenly and you will not. show. weakness._  
~

The medbay was busy--busier than he had ever seen it, which Hux supposed was understandable. An officer met him at the main entry and escorted him in a hurry past row on row of wounded troopers and pilots in varying stages of damage and recovery. The smell of blood and disinfectant was heavy in the air, and Hux’s miserable stomach lurched in response; he told it firmly that it was empty, any further acrobatics were pointless in any case, and he didn’t have time for it at the moment, and it subsided. 

Everyone seemed much more concerned with the people around him, instead of Hux himself, and that was a welcome relief. He let them lead him to the bacta treatment section, and….stopped, in the doorway. 

It looked as if a bomb had gone off. Viscous pink fluid was everywhere, dripping from the ceiling and walls, pooled on the floor; inch-thick transparisteel from the tank walls lay around like giant trumpery gems, along with pieces of control consoles. A couple of electrical cables dangled from the ceiling, spitting sparks. 

In the middle of all this devastation was a single figure, on its knees, arms wrapped around itself, shivering violently. The face was hidden beneath sticky black hair. 

“Oh, _hells_ ,” said Hux, and came forward into the chamber, his boots squelching in spilled bacta, his mental accountant ringing up just how much of the fluid was lost and how much that cost per ounce. Everyone else seemed to be frozen at the doorway, or stuck to the walls. No one stepped forward to prevent him, or say anything at all, and he could hear Ren’s ragged painful breathing. 

He stood looking down at Kylo Ren, and thought again _all that you love will be carried away_ , wondering through the pounding headache what it was supposed to mean, and then shrugged out of his greatcoat and knelt to drape it around the shaking shoulders. It felt as if someone else, someone other than him, was directing the scene, and Hux was merely watching from a little distance. He could feel quite clearly, though. The fluid, freed from its heated tanks, was already chilly where it soaked into his trouser knees. Ren was...

Ren was huddled in on himself so tightly that his shoulderblades, the knobs of his spine stood out, white bone glowing under the skin. This wasn't theatrics; this was fear. Raw fear. Hux had never considered Kylo Ren _capable_ of such a thing. 

“Ren,” he said, when the huddled figure didn’t immediately erupt into rage and fling him against the nearest hard surface. “Ren. Listen to me. You’re safe here. You are safe. Nothing here will harm you.”

Ren was shivering in miserable long waves. Slowly he raised his head, peering at Hux between sticky elflocks of hair. 

“I mean it,” Hux said. “Whatever you...dreamed, or saw, whatever you’re afraid of, it’s not in here.”

Ren’s eyelashes were clumped in those dramatic black points, this time with bacta fluid rather than tears, but they were exactly as effective. Hux wished wearily that this were not the case. Ren tried to say something, then dissolved into heavy painful coughing, arms wrapped tighter around himself, and Hux said something his family would have disapproved of and put his own arm around Ren’s shaking shoulders, heedless of how much his hand hurt, or how his coat--like everything else--was almost certainly a complete loss. 

It took a few moments before Kylo Ren could get his coughing under control, and Hux just stayed where he was, steadying him, and found himself rubbing Ren’s back awkwardly through the coat, his hand clumsy and awkward with pain, not knowing what the hells he was doing, not able to stop it. “It’s because you were in the tank,” he said. “The breathing tube. Makes your throat hurt, it won’t last.”

He was vaguely aware that they had an audience, and also vaguely aware that his headache was really outdoing itself, and wondered if you knew if you were having a stroke, but nothing seemed to matter other than the wretched lump of mortality that was...okay, leaning against him, leaning against his shoulder, as if this were an advisable course of action. “Did...did you just wake up?”

Ren nodded, eyes squeezed shut, pressing closer, and something in Hux that had been nearing its tensile limit finally broke. He wrapped his other arm around the leader of the Knights of Ren, around Snoke’s pet pseudo-Sith, around his rival and co-commander, sitting back on his heels, and held him close, because everything had already stopped making sense, everything had already snapped and broken and ceased to function properly; and when Kylo Ren’s shaking hands crept around him, tentatively at first, then desperately tight, he let himself be held. “We’re back on the _Finalizer_ ," he told Ren. "The hyperdrive’s broken, they’re working on it now, but it’ll be a day or so more before we reach Snoke. You’re going to be fine.” He looked up from the dark head pressed against his shoulder. “He’s going to be fine, right?”

“Yes, sir,” said one of the droids. Most of the human personnel who were present hadn’t stirred from the doorway or walls. “Lord Ren is recovering. Although he would recover faster had the bacta tanks not been destroyed, I do have to point out---”

“Consider it pointed,” said Hux. “He’s freezing. Get...blankets, lots of them, and get him into a hot bath. Now. And clean up this mess.”

The droid, with uncharacteristic tact, did not point out that nobody could do anything until General Hux and Kylo Ren let go of one another, and a few minutes later when some of the human medbay personnel approached the pair of them Hux did look up and allow himself to be detached. Amid the clamor and bustle of cleaning up, nobody noticed when Hux, sans coat, walking not quite steadily, left the room. 

In his own quarters, Hux stared at his red-rimmed eyes in the mirror over the sink and splashed water on his face. He had no idea what had come over him back there--only no, he _did_ , he absolutely did, it was simply _what should be done_ , the right thing to do, but since when had his actions been governed by what was the _right_ thing to do so much as the thing that was _required_ to be done?

His head ached like a rotten tooth, the pain pulsing from the sharp outer rim of his right eye socket, and the hand Kylo Ren had gripped on that trip out of the dying planet felt as if red-hot wires had been threaded through a couple of the fingers. He couldn’t close the hand without pain, and couldn’t make one of the fingers move at all without sufficient pain to make his stomach lurch. _I’ll get it fixed_ , he told himself. _Later. I’ll get it fixed later. Right now I have...things...that must be done._

He could not sleep, despite the pain, despite the weight of fatigue that made him feel slow and stupid and heavy; and duty drove him out of his quarters in the small hours of ship-time morning to pace the bridge in his second-best uniform and without his coat. This time when an official approached him to ask for his presence in medbay he did not argue, and simply told the woman that he would be there if needed but in his absence his next-in-command was in charge, and stalked down the corridors to the turbolift. 

“He’s stable,” said the doctor who met Hux at the medbay doors. “Still weak, and it will take a while for the side wound to heal completely, but he’s stable. Can be moved.”

“Mm,” said Hux. 

“...Are _you_ feeling quite well, General?” the doctor asked, blinking at him. “You look a little…”

“I’m fine,” he said. “Thank you for your concern, Doctor. If I require your services I will request them.”

The doctor shut up, and Hux was vaguely aware of a flush of color in the man’s face that came and went. He was annoying people. That wasn’t new. That didn’t matter. He was not entirely certain what _did_ matter, at the moment, but he would work it out. 

In his private room, Ren was lying propped up on pillows with a tube snaking into one arm and fresh white bandages visible beneath the thin medbay shift he wore. The slash across his face was shiny with bacta, the edges held together with a series of steristrips. Other than that he looked...so much himself, Hux thought, that the shaking mess of the previous evening seemed vastly improbable. 

“Lord Ren,” he said. “You wanted something?”

Ren’s eyes drifted from his face down to the chair by the bed, and Hux dropped into it with no grace at all. “Tell me….” he said, and Hux could tell speaking hurt him. “Tell me what you told the Supreme Leader.”

“About you?”

Ren nodded. 

“That you were hurt, and couldn’t be moved. He wanted me to have you transferred to another ship to take you to him, and I said it was unsafe because of the…” Hux gestured vaguely. “The Force thing. He agreed.”

Ren’s eyes had been following his hand--his right hand, in its glove. 

“He said, however, that I had better expedite the repairs so that I could bring you to him as quickly as possible,” Hux finished. He had already made sure that no one was listening in on this particular conversation. “I assured the Supreme Leader we would redouble our efforts.”

“You’re in pain,” Ren said. 

“What? No. One of the three core-shield labyrinths is in good shape, it’s the other two that are questionable, and Engineering is working on them as we speak.”

“You’re in fairly severe pain,” Ren said. 

Hux realized too late that he’d drawn his right hand protectively against his chest. “Get out of my mind,” he said, but it was more weary than furious.

“I’m not in your mind. It’s...you’re broadcasting.” Ren closed his eyes, opened them again. Bruised shadows smudged the pale skin beneath each; he still had almost no color in his face at all. Hux thought he looked almost evanescently tired, as tired as it might be possible to be before falling completely to pieces, and recalled his own weary eyes in the mirror. “Let me see,” Ren said, and he found himself holding out the hand without meaning to, and not having the energy to take it back. 

Ren touched it with surprising gentleness, taking Hux’s wrist and running his fingertips over the glove. He winced, sharply, as if something he had touched had physically hurt him, and before Hux had the presence of mind to protest was working the glove carefully down over his hand. 

It wasn’t very pretty. The bruising had gone into some pretty impressive colors, and the fingers he was having trouble moving were swollen out of proportion. Ren stared at the hand, then let his gaze travel up to Hux’s face, slow, unreadable. 

“Did I do this?” he said.

Hux looked away. “You were out of your head,” he said. “I just held on while the droid knitted you back together, that’s all.”

“Two of these fingers are broken,” Kylo Ren said. “It must have hurt you a great deal. And...gone on hurting.”

“Can I have my hand back now?” he said, trying not to notice how nice the cool fingertips felt against his hot skin. 

“And you have...barely slept,” Ren continued, “not to mention being ill with exhaustion and migraine. And sought no help, General?”

Hux looked at him. “It’s a headache,” he said. “Can you stop doing...whatever it is you’re doing, please?”

“I can help,” Ren said, and suddenly he looked young again, terribly, unacceptably young, the way he had in the snow, in the forest. “I can fix this. Will you let me?”

Hux was about to refuse, about to wrench his hand free and stalk out of there and go to check on Engineering’s progress, but somehow the version of him that could have done that seemed to have been left behind in the dying forest. It felt...ridiculously nice, those cool hands holding his, and everything was over anyway, everything was broken and lost and he didn’t even know if he would survive his next interview with his commanding officer and Kylo Ren’s eyes were _asking_ , not demanding, not telling, and he just slumped as if his strings had all been cut, closing his eyes. “Fix me,” he said. “Fix me. I seem to need it.”

He had been glad of the coolness of Ren’s touch, but the sudden startling heat that replaced that coolness did not hurt, did not burn, seeming to lift away and erase pain itself as it wrapped around his hand, through his hand, sinking into the bones. There was a brief terrible wrenching sensation, and Hux had time to think _those were my bones, he just set my bones with his mind_ before it faded under the peppery-hot tingle. After a moment he dared to open his eyes and look down at his hand, held in both of Ren’s; there was no visible glow surrounding them but he felt it as clearly as if he could see it, a warm bright light wrapping around his skin like a glove. It was...beautiful, Hux realized, beautiful the way a perfectly designed weapon firing was beautiful, the way a virtuoso musician’s performance was beautiful, and he was touched the way music touched him, and he was _warm_.

Hux had no idea how long it took before Kylo Ren let go of his hand and leaned back against the pillows, gasping, alarmingly pale. “--Are you all right?” he demanded.

Ren nodded, panting as if he’d just lifted something tremendously heavy. “I can’t...do anything...about the headaches,” he managed, eyes still shut. “But…you should be able to use the hand, now.”

He flexed the fingers, expecting the pain he’d grown used to, astonished that they obeyed him immediately and without protest. The swelling and bruises were gone; it was as if they had never been.

“Thank you,” Hux said, quietly. Ren nodded a little, still breathing hard, eyes shut. He was aware of that abrupt mental silence, again, the numbness of being alone inside his own head; and this time it was accompanied by a most unHuxlike desire to delay their return to Snoke. As long as possible. He didn’t know what Snoke had in mind for Ren, but somehow he was sure it was unpleasant. Moved by that thought, he took Ren’s hand back, holding it in both of his, now that he was able. “Thank you.”

Ren opened his eyes, too bright, blinked up at Hux. “You’re welcome,” he said, as if the words were not entirely familiar to him. “Next time...General...you should just come to me, and skip the theatrics.”

Hux stared at him, stunned, and then started to laugh--and it took him a few moments to recognize the sound. Everything was broken, everything was ruined, everything had been snatched away, but he was still somehow capable of laughter, and he discovered, suddenly, that he was fiercely determined not to lose it. He was so used to cold, and coldness was nothing but the absence of heat; finding heat, here, in such an unexpected place, felt like a small and vastly undeserved gift, and one he wanted to hold on to despite the enormity of the ramifications. Despite whatever lay ahead, despite Snoke, despite the Resistance. He did not want to let go, and it astonished him even as he realized it was true.


	3. Chapter 3

The _Resurgent_ -class Star Destroyers, like their predecessors in the Imperial Navy, were not just large; not just impressive; but _vast_. Built on a scale that was hard to imagine, they carried nineteen thousand officers and a staggering fifty-five thousand enlisted personnel, a full legion of stormtroopers, two starfighter wings. Over three thousand guns bristled from the nearly two full miles of hull, twice the length of an _Imperial_ -class ship. Pushed through sublight space by eleven massive ion engines, the _Resurgent_ -class was powered by a single huge hypermatter-annihilation reactor. Only the old Empire’s _Executor_ -class Star Dreadnoughts had been larger, and they had lacked a lot of the _Resurgent_ -class ships’ design advantages, such as better bridge shielding and an emergency backup control center from which attacks could be coordinated if the primary bridge was damaged or destroyed. 

Hux did not know every inch of his ship, because there were over a hundred and fourteen thousand of them; but he knew the _Finalizer_ as well as any spacecraft could be known. He had the specs of every system memorized, as well as consumable rates, nominal output levels, and where cross-connections could be made to bypass damaged or malfunctioning equipment without seriously compromising the performance of the ship as a whole. 

The hyperdrive generator was located all the way aft, its six motivator cores shielded by a complex mazework designed to contain the forces it developed when in use. Four of the six were unscathed; two were still under repair. They only carried one fully prepared spare shielding labyrinth assembly, and the _Finalizer_ ’s engineering division had been forced to fabricate the second, which was really causing the delay. Hux was reasonably sure that the precautionary replacement was unnecessary, but he could not stop seeing the cracks appearing in his planet’s hide as it died underneath him, and he did not particularly feel like capping off a hitherto relatively distinguished career by getting himself and the rest of his command vaporized by a malfunctioning hyperdrive. 

He stood watching the work from the observation gantry. Uniformed men and women swarmed over the huge, awkward form of the drive generator. This far aft, the vibration of the ship’s three vast KDY main engines was constantly present, less a sound than a feeling transmitted through one’s boot soles, and the drive generator sat on vibration-dampening insulation to prevent it from damage. The coolant conduits that fed the generator were also cradled in anti-vibration material, which was particularly important, since a breach in the coolant lines would not only shut down the generator but render this entire section of the ship very rapidly lethal until the leak could be contained and the atmosphere scrubbed of toxic coolant gas. 

The gas was green, Hux knew. He had seen it a few times. Vivid poison-green, and heavier than air, so that it rolled along the floor like dry-ice mist. There was one of the conduits, right there, curling around the humped shoulder of the nearest core labyrinth. He found himself staring at it, fixed in position by a kind of intense instinct he could not identify, and everything was very cold and very clear and very focused as he saw a multitool slip and fall from the hand of a worker, turning over and over in the air, and as he watched it slice through the coolant hose. 

_I knew that was going to happen_ , Hux thought, still frozen as the bright-green hissing cloud engulfed the worker, whose scream was choked off as her vocal cords burned through. He could not move, even as the alarms sounded and pandemonium seized the hyperdrive generator bay, people yelling and running in all directions, order temporarily forgotten. He could not move, and the acrid smell of the coolant gas stung his nose, his eyes, his throat as it spewed from the torn-open hose. _I am going to die_ , he thought, still stunned at how utterly cold and remote everything felt. _I am going to die and none of this will have mattered_ \--and with his next breath he could feel the stuff _sizzling_ in his throat and chest, feel things inside him let go with hot drilling agony--

He woke, both hands at his throat, gasping. Slowly the remains of the nightmare faded away, and he was back in his own quarters, alone, unharmed. 

Calmness was slow to return, but Hux forced himself to take slow breaths and focus on his surroundings. He had clearly been thrashing around in the dream; the bedclothes were crumpled and twisted around him, damp with sweat. _It was a dream, and it is over,_ he told himself. _The repair work is proceeding according to plan._

But the clarity of the falling tool and the hissing green poison remained startlingly vivid, and Hux realized that he had known it was going to happen because _he had seen it happen before_ , that what he had been dreaming was one of the simulation scenarios they had all gone through in training. The simulations were an aspect of First Order training that had originally been the brainchild of his father, Commandant Brendol Hux, under the old Empire, and they were one of the main reasons that the First Order’s troops were significantly more effective than the Empire’s clone troopers had been.

Hux got out of bed, still shaking with the aftereffects of remembered terror. The coolant-leak scenario was one of the more challenging of that series, and a lot of people had died several times in a row before they worked out how best to handle the situation. If you died in the sim, you were supposed to take particular note of what you had done wrong for the next run. That was the point. 

He showered, quickly, and dressed just as quickly so as not to lose the brief heat the water had lent him. He wasn’t on duty again for another three hours, but there was no way he would be able to get back to sleep, not with that dream still lingering in his head. It was troubling for several reasons. He did not often dream, for one thing, and when he did it was generally vague and unspecific imagery that faded at once upon waking. And there was something so intense about the memory of standing there and watching the accident unfold that Hux wondered exactly _why_ his brain had thrown up that particular image, what it was trying to tell him.

They had one day left of scheduled repair work before the _Finalizer_ could make the jump to lightspeed and set off on its way to Snoke’s coordinates. One day. And then, once that day was over, once they were on their way, Hux had no idea what to expect--except that it would not be good. He had objectively failed to complete his mission. It did not matter that the failure had not been his alone, that Ren’s lousy decision-making plus bad luck plus those wretched Resistance pilots had been factors in the outcome. His failure was enough. Supreme Leader Snoke would be entirely justified in making an example of him; it was not as if the First Order lacked decently competent officials who could be promoted to his position and be reasonably expected to do the job in front of them. Hux was very, very much aware that he was far from irreplaceable. 

He stared at himself in the mirror as his hands went about their practiced tasks, gelling and combing his hair. He looked more or less as he usually did, perhaps paler and redder under the eyes than might be desired, but reasonably well squared away. The headache was still there, but it had retreated to a bearable distance and had apparently given up on the sparkles and violent nausea; it was just a dull throb at the outer corner of his right eye, one he could live with. The death of Starkiller Base had left no visible marks on him. 

Unlike Kylo Ren. Hux yanked his mind sharply away from that thought and pointed it in a different direction, but it refused to be diverted: he could not _not_ wonder what Snoke had in store for Ren, who had--let’s face it--failed more spectacularly than any of them. Losing the droid had been bad enough; then losing the girl, then losing the lightsaber duel _with_ the girl, an untried scavenger from the armpit of the galaxy, how had _that_ been possible--and Hux didn’t know what had happened with Solo, but it hadn’t been good. He’d warned Ren, before everything had started falling to pieces: _careful that you do not let your personal desires get in the way of orders from Supreme Leader Snoke_ , and Ren had been very Ren about it and stalked off in his best Vader impression and Hux had mostly wanted to strangle him, and now--

_Now what?_ he asked himself, and relocated a stray lock of hair, examining his reflection. _Now what?_

_I don’t know, damn it._ Why had he dreamed about the coolant-leak sim scene? Why that, of all things, now?

_I think you know_ , said another voice in his head. His own voice, but weary as hell. 

_And now I’m talking to myself. Why am I talking to myself?_

_You know that one, too,_ said the voice. _You dreamed about the coolant leak because you know what happens in that scene, and what its implications are, and perhaps you do not so very much wish for the hyperdrive to be repaired in a tearing hurry, given what might be waiting for you at journey’s end. Perhaps part of you wouldn’t mind if that scenario came true._

_That’s nonsensical, as well as treasonous_ , he thought, fiercely, and glowered at himself in the mirror. _It was a dream, that’s all, and dreams cannot affect me. I won’t let them. Besides, it would only delay the inevitable, and that briefly, at best._

Turning on his heel, he left the room, and tried not to listen to the weary little voice: _And yet even a little time is better than no time at all._

It was not until afterward that he realized that an odd little flicker of feeling---as opposed to empty numbness--had been there, present, in the back of his mind, since waking up; it was so faint and so dim that overlooking its presence had been easy. 

~

No one was surprised to see Hux on the bridge before the beginning of his shift; he often stayed up here through what were supposed to be his sleeping periods, mostly because it was possible to get a lot more work done when no one was around. Nor was anyone surprised at his query into the progress of the repair work. It was expected that General Hux should be anxious to get the work completed as fast as possible and rejoin the Supreme Leader. The officer who had to admit that progress was not, in fact, going as fast as had been foreseen was expecting a standard Hux icy dressing-down, but received nothing more than a slightly distracted nod. “But nothing is wrong?” Hux demanded. “There have been no incidents?”

“No, sir,” said the officer, taken aback. “The work continues, but there has been a brief unforeseen delay in fabrication of the second labyrinth assembly. Engineering projects that it should still be possible to complete the repair on schedule if no further delays arise.”

“Mm,” said Hux. “I shall inspect the progress myself. Carry on.”

The journey from the bridge to the hyperdrive generator bay took fifteen minutes, even with the turbolifts and at his fastest stalk, and Hux spent the entire time trying not to think about sim-scenes. There had been so many, throughout his life. Time spent in holoproj suites in a dozen different training facilities in a dozen different Unknown Regions bases, across a childhood shaped and directed entirely by orders. The fact that he was Brendol Hux’s son had done him no favors when it came to his performance in the sims; if anything, he was judged with even more intense scrutiny than his peers. _Coddling weaknesses_ , Commandant Hux had said, _would prevent the development of a strong herd_ , and Hux had been a good ten years into his training before he truly understood that other people had _not_ had such stringent requirements to live up to; that not everyone had gone through life under such conditions. That it was even possible to _be_ any different from the way he was, or that if possible, such a thing might be allowed. 

If he were to be entirely honest with himself, that was part of the reason that Kylo Ren’s antics got so very far up his nose: Ren was allowed to behave like a spoiled child with little to no repercussions from Snoke, whereas if he himself had dared to try even a fraction of the stupid things Ren regularly engaged in, the young Hux would have faced significant consequences. Setting aside the completely unnecessary and counterproductive unstable nature of that wretched lightsaber, the fact that Ren casually and repeatedly used it to destroy First Order property would absolutely not have been allowed in the world Hux had known. Deliberately damaging one’s own equipment was unthinkable, and particularly doing it out of childish unrestrained spite. Not only did Snoke not address Ren’s behavior, he refused to support Hux’s authority in the matter, and it was _infuriating_ on a number of levels having to try to uphold military order and hierarchy when his authority was being undermined, regularly, by a histrionic twerp in a _thoroughly unnecessary mask_.

He realized he was breathing hard, and forced himself to uncurl his hands from fists. It just pushed every single button he had, thinking about the mask and the lightsaber and the grandstanding. He was used to that, used to the sensation of a hot uncomfortable weight of frustration in his chest, just at the end of his breastbone, that made breathing difficult at times with its sheer intensity. Frustration, and anxiety, although Brendol Hux’s son was not technically allowed to be anxious about anything, ever; that was tantamount to weakness, and weakness was failure, which was not an acceptable option. 

Hux’s headache clanged dully behind his right eye. _I will be glad_ , he thought, _I will be very glad indeed when we reach Snoke and this is finally over._

But the sight of the hyperdrive generator repair work knocked back the familiar hot clenched feeling, and he took a deep breath, willing himself to be calm, standing on the observation gantry and watching the scene. It was almost exactly as it had been in his dream. There were the workers in their black overalls, there was the hunched awkward form of the half-completed shielding labyrinth, there was the dangling coolant hose. In reality no one was climbing above it in such a way as to be able to drop a sharp multitool and damage the hose, but his fingers were white inside their gloves as he gripped the railing nonetheless. He could see it with terrible, vivid clarity. 

_Would you mind thinking a little less noisily?_ someone said inside his head, and Hux only just stopped himself from yelping. His vision swam in sparkles for a moment. Blinking furiously, he stared down at the scene below, hanging on to the railing, and fought for calm. 

_Get_ out _of my_ head, he thought, to the accompaniment of fresh clanging behind his right eye. 

_I’m not_ in _your head. As I said before, you are broadcasting. Yours is a particularly, shall we say,_ forceful _mind._

_I’m doing no such thing._

_Which one of us has the experience here?_ said the voice. _I don’t particularly_ enjoy _listening to you rant about me. You do it an awful lot._

_I do not,_ Hux thought, furiously. _And I wouldn’t have to if you didn’t behave so atrociously all the damned time, so kindly shut up._

_You feel a conflict. It is not one you are used to, I think._

_Of course I don’t. There is no conflict._

_You’re lying, General. You aren’t particularly good at it, either; then again, I don’t suppose you’ve had a lot of practice._

Hux forced himself to relax his grip on the railing. The repaired right hand ached slightly. _I’ll overlook the gross insult_ , he thought, _if you stop talking, right now, and stay out of my mind._

_I can’t promise anything. You’re the one who’s emoting at the top of his mental voice._

“What--” he began, and swallowed hard, letting go of the railing. _What do I have to do to make you stop?_

_Come and talk to me,_ said the voice. _I’m bored. It’s objectively boring, lying here and awaiting one’s unspecified but undoubtedly unpleasant fate._

_No_ , Hux thought. _I’m busy. Some of us around here have jobs to do._

_Suit yourself. But don’t blame me for overhearing your thoughts, General. Especially the ones about your father. An interesting relationship, there._

Coldness flooded through Hux. _Shut up_ , he said, and there was ice forming on every syllable.

The voice was silent. He straightened up, turning on his heel, and stalked back the way he had come. Below him, the hyperdrive repair workers looked at one another and shrugged: who knew what all _that_ had been about?


	4. Chapter 4

In ship time, it was late evening when Hux returned to the medbay and gave orders that he required to speak to Kylo Ren alone, without disturbances, and in private. He did so with his ordinary sharp-edged efficiency, and none of the medbay personnel wondered too very much as to the subject of their putative conversation: that was way, way above most of their pay grades. Mostly they were relieved to see Hux. Nobody else on board had authority over Lord Ren; at least General Hux was the equivalent of his rank, and could perhaps persuade Ren to stop being quite so...difficult. A bored Kylo Ren was an awful lot to handle. 

“General,” Ren said, pleasantly enough. “I was wondering when you’d show up.”

“No you weren’t.” Hux leaned against the closed door, with his arms folded. “You’re familiar with my schedule, not that you’ve ever bothered to show the slightest respect for it, and if you can read my mind from thirty decks away at the other end of the ship I sincerely doubt that working out my whereabouts at any given time would pose a significant challenge.”

“True.” He shrugged a little, with a wince. “I knew you were coming. Happy?”

“Not particularly.” Hux detached himself from the door and came over to sit beside the bed. Ren was lying against his mound of pillows more or less exactly as he had been the last time Hux had seen him--unreadable expression, steristrips, and all. There was a faint not-very-healthy flush of color high on each cheek that Hux didn’t much like.

“May I ask the reason for the pleasure of your company?” Ren asked. Hux’s scowl deepened. 

“Don’t play games, Ren. You said yourself I had a, what was it, particularly _forceful_ mind.”

“It may surprise you to hear that I haven’t been listening to it,” Ren said. “Not since this morning, anyway. Which is a lot more difficult than you might imagine. It’s sort of like not listening to someone singing grand opera in the next room down the hall. I’m fatigued.”

He looked evanescent, as he had before: worn, terribly pale except for those faint blotches of color, his huge eyes hooded, his oddly soft mouth drawn down at the corners. The tone he was using was that particular absently-amused flavor of condescension that always scraped Hux’s nerves raw, but there was a heaviness to it that suggested he really had been expending some effort. 

“I want answers,” Hux said, “and I want my coat back, but I doubt you’re the one I need to ask for that.”

“It’s a very nice coat,” said Kylo Ren. “I can understand why. What answers do you seek?”

“For one thing, how long have you been able to listen to my thoughts?”

The eyes widened in a who-me look that made the familiar weight of frustration flare up in Hux’s chest. “I can hear _everyone’s_ thoughts, General,” Ren said. “I’m flattered you imagine the attention to be personal.”

Hux let that one go, with conscious effort. “So you’ve been aware of everything I think for the past...how long have we known each other?”

“Not everything. But, as I said, your mind is a particularly difficult one to ignore. Why does this bother you?”

He stared. “Why does this _bother_ me?”

“Mm. What about it is objectionable?”

“Well, the utter disregard for privacy might have something to do with it,” Hux said, continuing to stare. “I don’t suppose you could have _said_ something, by chance? This is like...it’s like hearing that not only is someone casually rifling through your private belongings on a regular basis but that they have been doing so for _years_. Do you really not understand that, or are you just being obtuse because it amuses you?”

Ren tilted his head, regarding Hux with eyes that he found himself tiredly noticing yet again were very large, very dark, and very thick-lashed, and blinked. “I can’t imagine why you mind so much,” he said. “It’s not as if your thoughts are particularly _interesting_ , after all. Most of them. The ones about your father, Commandant Hux...those thoughts, General, do intrigue me.”

Hux went very still, and closed his eyes for a moment, taking a deep, deep breath. “Tell me, Lord Ren,” he said, biting off each word. “Do you have _any_ redeeming characteristics at all?”

There was silence, and he opened his eyes to find Kylo Ren apparently giving that some consideration, regarding the ceiling with his head tilted slightly. “Well,” he said, after a while. “I’m tall, unlike some people. That’s useful. And you will notice that while I am entirely capable of torturing you with my brain, General, I am not doing so _at this precise moment_.”

“Don’t threaten me,” Hux said wearily. “It’s gauche.”

“Who said that was a threat? You asked a question, and I answered it.” Ren sat up a bit, his mouth tightening, and stared at Hux. “You’re _not_ scared of me,” he added, as if just coming to this realization. 

“No,” Hux agreed. “I’m not.”

Ren did a bit more staring, and he could _feel_ that dark gaze boring into him, feel it like a physical touch. It took a lot of strength he really couldn’t afford to sit perfectly still and look Ren in the face, but he did it anyway. 

“You’re not,” Ren repeated, and flopped back against the pillows, looking terribly young again. Hux wished he wouldn’t _do_ that. “You know I could kill you, and you’re not frightened of me.”

“I’m a soldier. Lots of people want to kill me; it’s in the job description.”

“But you don’t feel fear. And yet...you object to the thought of discussing your father.”

Hux caught himself just in time before he ran his hands through his hair, and made himself clasp them calmly in his lap instead. “Yes,” he said, after several steadying deep breaths. “I object to the thought of it. I’m not discussing _anybody_ ’s father, _Lord Ren_.”

Kylo Ren’s eyes widened very briefly, and Hux thought that one had gone home. “And I would appreciate it,” he added, “on a personal and professional level, if you would stay out of my head from here on.”

There was a pause which went on just a little too long, and then Ren shrugged, with another wince. “I’ll try,” he said, rubbing at his shoulder, where the edge of a bandage was just visible under the medbay gown. “My turn, if we are asking questions. Why did you come back for me?”

Hux raised an eyebrow, and was more than a little surprised to see Ren look away, as if not quite able to meet his gaze. “I told you,” he said. “I had orders.”

“It would have been perfectly feasible to avoid carrying that one out,” Ren said, fiddling with the edge of the blanket. “You must have had very little time left. Surely the simpler and safer option would have been to leave the planet immediately, rather than spending precious time locating and retrieving me.”

“Yes,” he said. “But I had orders.”

“Did you never question them?”

“Does it matter?”

Ren looked up. “ _Did you question them?_ ”

“Yes,” he snapped. “Yes, I questioned them. I thought about leaving you there. All right? Is that what you want to hear?”

“Why didn’t you?”

This time he couldn’t catch himself before the hands slid into the hair, and he made a face at the feeling of carefully gelled arrangement being tousled out of regulation. “ _Now_ look what you made me do. Why didn’t I leave you there? I don’t know, Ren. Possibly because I don’t make it a habit to disobey orders in general, and particularly those of the Supreme Leader. Possibly because this whole mess is in large part your fault, not just mine, and I don’t see why you shouldn’t be there to bear your share of it. Possibly because I couldn’t.”

“But you hate me,” Kylo Ren said, quietly. 

Hux looked at him, feeling approximately a thousand years old. “Oh, for the sake of all space, are we really doing this? I don’t hate you. Well...not _hate_. Not most of the time. Hate is unprofessional and immature. I find practically everything about you profoundly irritating, and you go to considerable pains to maximize that irritation.”

“You hate my lightsaber.”

“Yes, all right,” he admitted. “I hate your lightsaber. Happy now?”

“Why?”

Hux took a deep breath, feeling something loosen in his chest. “Why? Because it’s showy and dangerous and unstable and you use it to chop up parts of my ship on a regular basis. Because the reason it looks that way is that it’s _broken_. You’re perfectly capable of building yourself a new one that hasn’t got a cracked crystal and that isn’t constantly threatening to slice your own stupid fingers off every time you switch it on, but no, you hang on to that thing despite the danger because you think it looks impressive and frightening and goes with your _aesthetic_.”

He hadn’t meant to go that far. Ren was staring at him, still looking impossibly young, his mouth slightly open. Hux sighed. “And the mask is stupid, too. You don’t need to hide behind a damn vocoder and a scowly-faced bucket to impress people. There, I’ve said it.”

Ren didn’t reply for long enough that Hux wondered if he might be going to finish this terrible, terrible day by being Force-choked unconscious. After a very long moment, however, Ren began fiddling with the edge of the blanket again, and sighed. “I’m not going to cut my own fingers off,” he said, quietly. “I’m careful.”

This was so patently absurd that Hux did not feel it merited a response. “But I’m touched by your concern,” Ren said at last. 

“I’m more concerned with not becoming the entire First Order’s laughingstock,” he said drily. “Being remembered as the co-commander of somebody whose showy impractical headliner of a weapon exploded and took out thirty members of the officer corps is not exactly a recipe for glory.”

“It’s not going to _explode_ ,” Ren said, sounding miffed, and there was that flicker of heat again in his mind, in his chest. “It’s under control.”

“I’ll remember that next time I need to requisition a new console,” said Hux. “So: what did you mean, this morning, about a conflict?”

Ren blinked at him, and then made a face. “Oh. That.”

“Yes, that.”

“You don’t want to go back,” he said. “You don’t want to go back to Snoke, because you’re afraid of what he’ll do, and you don’t know what the future holds; but you don’t feel that you have a choice.”

It was Hux’s turn to blink. “I--”

“And you don’t want to take _me_ back, either, because you think that whatever Snoke plans on doing to you is going to be, most likely, more pleasant than what Snoke plans on doing to me. I fully concur with that prediction.”

“You’re his apprentice, though,” Hux said. 

“Yes, which is why my failure will be a more personal insult to him than your own. You’re just a soldier. There’s nothing like so much at stake.”

“He said he would complete your training himself.”

“I have no doubt of it,” Ren said, and his voice was bleak. “You don’t know the extent to which I failed, General. You think you do, but you are mistaken.”

“Tell me,” he said. Ren looked at him, sharply, and Hux could feel something like a touch, a phantom pressure, ghosting its way behind his eyes; it woke another clang from his mostly-quiescent headache. Then it was gone again. 

“You really mean that,” Ren said, wondering. “You actually mean it.”

“I don’t say things I don’t mean,” Hux replied. “Tell me.”

“I…” he began. “I can’t.”

Hux regarded him thoughtfully. “All right. But if you change your mind, I’d like to hear it.” And not because he particularly wanted to glory in Ren’s failure; he simply wanted to know. Knowing was almost always better than _not_ knowing, in Hux’s experience, even if the knowledge was terrible: having the parameters of a scenario made clear meant that it was possible at least to try to figure out an approach that would not get _everybody_ killed all at once. 

Ren nodded slowly. The thought occurred to Hux that this was probably the longest conversation they had ever had with one another, ever, and he smiled a little despite himself. 

“What’s so funny? --Hang on.” Ren lifted a hand in a sharp gesture, listening to something Hux could not hear, and then his expression changed. For a moment Hux couldn’t place it, and then he recognized a kind of mirthless amusement, blended with what looked like apprehension. 

“What--” he began, but his comlink beeped. 

“ _Bridge to General Hux,_ ” it said. He tapped the link. 

“Hux. Go ahead.”

“ _General, Engineering reports that the hyperdrive generator repair is complete and the generator is fully functional. We are ready to make the jump to lightspeed on your command._ ”

Kylo Ren’s little twisted smile deepened. For a long moment he and Hux looked at one another. 

_I have to do this_ , he thought. 

_I know._

“I’m on my way,” he told the comlink, holding Ren’s gaze. “Rig the ship for hyperspace. Hux out.”


	5. Chapter 5

The last time Hux had been to see Supreme Leader Snoke in person, Snoke’s mobile command post had been located in an old skyhook that dated back to Imperial days. Snoke had caused a lot of the luxurious fittings to be ripped out and replaced with the cold, almost monastic austerity Hux always associated with him, but the structure had been recognizable as a thing of artificial design. 

This time he’d hollowed out an asteroid. A small one, to be sure, but an asteroid nonetheless. They had left the cloaked _Finalizer_ a safe distance away, and their command shuttle had approached quite close before Hux had been able to make out any distinguishing marks whatsoever to separate this asteroid from any of the billions of others in this particular system’s rock belt. Just the glint here and there of sensors, the slight difference in albedo where the surface texture changed. For a nasty moment he’d wondered if there was some mistake, and then if there _wasn’t_ and Snoke really wanted them to land on a bloody asteroid for some unknowable reason; and then the rough brown-grey rock passing underneath them opened in a black gape, two wide blast doors sliding back on hidden tracks to reveal a landing bay. 

Their trip here had been completely routine. On a ship the size of the _Finalizer_ you really barely even noticed the jolt when the hyperdrive motivators kicked in and sent the entire unthinkable mass of the ship and its contents and crew hurtling beyond the speed of light; on a smaller craft, the entire frame _creaked_ at the moment of the jump. The _Finalizer_ had merely given a faint shudder as the stars beyond the viewport blurred and stretched into their streaks, and settled on her way. 

Hux had spent the travel time in a series of meetings with his senior officers, ensuring he was completely up to speed on where everything stood, and had not once felt that little flicker of warmth or heard Ren’s infuriating voice inside his head. Either Ren was keeping quiet, or he actually was trying to stay out of Hux’s mind. Either way, it represented an improvement. Hux hadn’t actually set eyes on Ren himself until just before they landed, when--fully swathed in his usual unrelieved black, helmet in place--he had appeared on the shuttle’s flight deck to watch their approach. 

Hux had nodded to him, and received a brief nod in return, and that was it for communicative attempts. When the shuttle touched down, Ren was the first one out, stalking down the ramp between the hissing jets of steam. Hux couldn’t detect even the hint of a limp. 

They still hadn’t returned Hux’s greatcoat to him. Without it he did not quite feel self-conscious, but definitely chilly, and he missed the warmth and weight of the coat draped over his shoulders. He drew himself up and motioned to the aides who had accompanied him, and with them at his heels, followed Ren out of the shuttle and into Snoke’s new lair. 

Inside, the corridors and chambers looked not unlike those on Starkiller, polished metal and plascrete, black and grey and chrome--but Hux was aware all the time of the sheer weight of the rock surrounding them, over their heads, under their feet. There were no viewports anywhere, and although he was used to vast starships and largely-subterranean planetside bases, Hux found this surprisingly oppressive. 

One of the things Hux had liked most about the (cold, exhausting, difficult) assignment to Starkiller had been the lack of formal social engagements. He had been the highest-ranking individual on-planet, unless you counted Kylo Ren, and there had been absolutely nobody on Starkiller who could _compel_ him to attend a formal dinner or reception, although he did make a brief appearance at the rare events he let his officers organize. It was enough to be seen; he had not felt it incumbent upon him to stay and be sociable. Within a few hours of making planetfall--asteroid-fall--here, he was wishing with all his heart to be back on Starkiller dealing with tantrum-slashed consoles or supply-chain foul-ups: the atmosphere was so completely stiff with formality that it made Hux’s upper lip twitch. 

Snoke was almost a relief by comparison. In real life the Supreme Leader was nothing like as imposing a presence as his hologram-projection self; barely taller than Hux when he stood up straight, Snoke looked almost frail in his heavy zeyd-cloth robes, twisted and pallid. Hux had no idea what had caused the scarring that warped his features, or the twisted furrow denting his skull, and had never imagined asking. 

Seated in a plain high-backed chair that somehow conveyed _throne_ without a hint of ornamentation, Snoke watched Hux’s approach, and nodded at his bow. “General,” he said, his voice still whispery and contemplative but less resonant in person. “At last. I trust all difficulties with my ship’s hyperdrive have been seen to?”

“Yes, Supreme Leader,” Hux said. “All systems are operational. My engineering staff performed commendably.”

“I will remember that.” Snoke steepled his fingers--the joints were knobbly and swollen, as if with age, but nobody had any real idea how old Snoke really _was_ \--and regarded Hux with lashless, unreadable eyes. “So, in your own words. Tell me what went wrong. From the beginning.”

Hux thought he could feel a flicker of pressure against his face, his eyes, as Snoke went on looking at him, and remembered Ren saying _you have a very forceful mind_. He took a deep breath, marshaling his thoughts, and when he spoke he both sounded and looked entirely calm. He began with the loss of the map on Jakku, and the subsequent escape of the prisoner Dameron, with the assistance of rogue trooper FN-2187, the abortive efforts to retrieve the droid, and Kylo Ren’s apparent interest in the scavenger girl who had got them off the planet. “In my opinion, Supreme Leader,” he said, “it was a mistake to assume that the girl and the droid were of equal value, intelligence-wise. We might well have been able to secure the droid on Takodana, had more troops been sent in after the Resistance pilots attacked, but it was lost to us when Kylo Ren made the decision to rely on his ability to extract the information from the girl.”

Snoke watched him, and Hux wondered again what in the sixteen hells Ren had been _thinking_. Yes, all right, _normally_ it didn’t take him very long to conduct interrogations with his brain, but even so the girl had seen the map what, a total of once? And who was to say that her recall of it would have been completely accurate in any case? Much better to get one’s hands on the map itself, rather than someone’s memory of a glimpse of it.

“Your point is well-made, General,” Snoke said, but there was a faint air of tolerance to the words that Hux thought meant the Supreme Leader did not quite agree. “Continue.”

“Relying on the girl meant that her escape presented a serious problem,” Hux said. “I am not privy to Lord Ren’s thought process, but once he became aware she had powers of her own, the possibility of her using them to escape would seem to have been a logical progression. But the destruction of Starkiller Base was the result of a series of errors compounded with bad luck. We were not prepared for a small force to be capable of infiltrating and disabling the shield generators. We were not prepared for a double attack on the oscillator--from the Resistance starfighters as well as Solo and his friends. I --”

“Yes, General?”

He swallowed, still standing perfectly at attention. “It is my view,” Hux said, “that the action of recharging the weapon to target the Ileenium system, rather than simply the Resistance base, was responsible for forcing the Resistance to attack Starkiller with everything they had. They already knew the awesome power of the weapon, after our demonstration on the Hosnian system. Had they not attacked Starkiller when they did, we might have been able to recapture the girl and extract the information we needed.”

“I recall you questioned my decision to target the system at the time,” said Snoke, evenly. “As did Ren. Your objection was noted then, as is your opinion now.”

Hux swallowed again, hard. “Yes, Supreme Leader,” he said.

Snoke watched him for a few long agonizing moments, and then sat back in his throne. Abruptly Hux could breathe more easily, and forced himself not to move, not to rub at his chest. 

“I am in the process of activating dark intelligence networks throughout the galaxy to renew our search for Skywalker,” Snoke said. “I will require you to play an active part in this search, General. And a more successful one.”

“Yes, Supreme Leader,” Hux said again. Snoke gave the little dismissive wave of one hand he knew so well from the holoproj. 

“That is all,” he said, and Hux bowed deeply, executed a perfect about-face, and had almost reached the door when Snoke added “You did well, General.”

Hux stopped. 

“In retrieving Kylo Ren,” Snoke said. “I would have been...most displeased, had you failed to bring him back to me.”

“Sir,” Hux said, feeling his stomach turn over. When there was no further word from Snoke, he began walking once more, and this time reached the safety of the corridor outside the chamber. 

~

The formal dinner that evening was just about as bad as Hux anticipated. Far too many courses, far too many official recognitions. He even had to make a brief speech, which he had _not_ anticipated, and the only positive thing about the entire experience was the fact that Kylo Ren was not there to witness his discomfiture. There was no mention of Ren in the program, and no place for him at the table where Hux sat.

After it was over, however, Hux found himself wondering why Ren had been excused from this particular turn in the barrel. Were official dinners beneath the dignity of Knights of Ren, or was it just that nobody had worked out how one could drink toasts through a thoroughly unnecessary helmet? 

He resolved to ignore the question. Ren’s schedule was not his problem, and neither was Ren, at the moment. That ought to feel like more of a relief than it did. He was not going to think about it, and he was going to try to get some decent sleep instead, and also not think about the coldness in Snoke’s eyes: _your objection was noted then, as is your opinion now._

It was about twenty minutes later that Hux said something unprintable, sat up, put his boots back on, and queried his guest quarters’ console for the location of Kylo Ren. 

~

The door to Ren’s assigned quarters hissed open on darkness. For a moment, as Hux’s eyes adjusted, he thought the room was empty; then by the very faint red light of a few telltales on a comm console, he made out a dark form lying on the bed. It stirred a little, and two glints of reflected red indicated eyes. 

“Come to view the departed, General?” said a sepulchral voice. Hux didn’t think he’d ever actually heard anyone sound _sepulchral_ before, but Kylo Ren managed it, possibly with the aid of diligent hours of practice. “I’m afraid I’m not terribly good company just at the moment.”

Hux stepped into the dim reddish twilight and let the door shut behind him. “You weren’t at the dinner. I came to see why. And when are you _ever_ terribly good company?” he added, squinting at Ren, who was lying perfectly still.

“I have my moments,” Kylo Ren said. “-- _Don’t_ turn on the light. Please.”

Hux’s hand stopped just shy of the light panel. “Did you just ask _nicely_?”

“I’m not quite myself.” The eyes closed, reopened, and there was the hint of a chuckle, almost a cough. “Actually I am _entirely_ myself. More’s the pity.”

Hux was not in the mood for this. He let his hand fall, coming over to the bed, and stared down at Kylo Ren. “What’s wrong with you? What happened?

“Nothing that need concern you, General,” said Ren, and Hux’s eyes had now adapted sufficiently for him to make out that while Ren was looking in his general direction, he was not making eye contact. Or rather, he would be, were Hux’s eyes about four inches to the right of their current location. He was also sweating fairly heavily, despite the relative coolness of the room. 

Hux’s initial curiosity--and exasperation--were giving way to concern: something was badly wrong here. “You can’t see properly, can you,” he said, his own voice quiet. Ren’s eyes--glassy slits--moved slightly, tracking him, but still not quite able to focus. 

“My vision will return in time. It always does.”

“Always? How often does this happen?”

“Not very.”

Hux ran his hands through his hair in renewed irritation. “This morning you were more or less your usual self, at least as far as I could tell--which reminds me, how many of those masks do you _have_ , anyway? I thought we left that thing behind on Starkiller. What have you been doing all day?” 

The coldness of Snoke’s eyes rose again in Hux’s mind. “Or...perhaps more to the point,” he said, slowly, “what has Snoke been doing to you?”

There was another of those hoarse little sounds that could have been a laugh or a cough. “Supreme Leader Snoke conveyed to me his evaluation of my recent performance,” Ren said. “Obviously.”

Awkwardly standing by the bed was beginning to grate on Hux’s few remaining nerves. There were no chairs in the room other than the one behind the desk console, so he sat down on the edge of Kylo Ren’s bed--and froze. 

At the slight movement of the mattress as it took Hux’s weight, Ren had caught his breath sharply, with a stifled little moan, and was now squeezing his eyes closed, fingers pressed against his face hard enough for the tendons to stand out. 

_Oh_ , Hux thought, as a number of pieces fell into place, remembering Ren on the _Finalizer_ , saying _I can’t do anything about the headaches, but you should be able to use the hand_. “I’m sorry,” he said out loud. “I didn’t realize. Is--are you --”

He wasn’t used to feeling helpless. After a few moments Ren’s fingers relaxed, but he didn’t take them away from his face, and he didn’t open his eyes. “I have already been extremely sick a total of four times so far this evening, but if I anticipate a fifth I shall let you know, General,” he said, not quite through clenched teeth. “Was there something in particular you wanted?”

“I didn’t know you had these headaches,” he said, sounding foolish to himself even as the words came out. 

“For reasons which should be obvious, I prefer not to advertise the fact. Usually they _aren’t_ this bad. Usually I haven’t spent several hours in the presence of a powerful Force-user taking full advantage of the strength inherent in his own displeasure.” Now he took the hands away, keeping his eyes closed, and Hux could see his hair was damp with sweat at the temples. 

Hux ran over his own debriefing in his memory. Snoke had been...displeased, yes, and still determined to locate Skywalker before the Jedi Order could raise its meddlesome head once more, but at no point had Snoke threatened him with…

Looking down at Kylo Ren, the word _torture_ rose into his mind. 

“No,” said Ren, sounding terribly, terribly weary. “Not torture. You would not understand. Nor would you be permitted to try.”

Hux started to say something, and then just sighed, slumping a little. “No, I don’t understand, and I don’t think I particularly want to,” he said, at last. “But from the point of view of a soldier, this strikes me as a poorly-thought-out maneuver.”

“Careful, General.”

“What, is _he_ listening to my mind too?”

“Possibly. I don’t know. This room is clean--at the moment, that is; I don’t think he planned on the eventuality of my having a visitor--but everywhere else he is undoubtedly listening to your voice; this is his headquarters, and the Supreme Leader does so value information.”

Hux could hear it, in that whispery voice. _In...for...mation._ “All I mean,” he said, reasonably, ignoring the bit about unexpected visits, “is that if one has possession of a tactical asset, even if one is… _displeased_...with its performance, taking that displeasure out on the asset itself is counterproductive, inefficient, and bad for morale.”

“‘Asset’,” Ren repeated. “Is that what you think of me?”

“You know perfectly well what I think of you. And what good does...this…do?” he asked, waving a hand at the darkened room. “How has incapacitating you, even temporarily, advanced the overall objective?”

“You think too much, General,” Ren said, opening his eyes at last and looking up at Hux. “Did anyone ever tell you that, when you were little?”

“No,” he said.

“A pity. You might have been happier.”

Hux stared at him. “Are you possibly having some sort of cerebral incident?” he said. “You’re making even less sense than usual. Can you move the extremities on both sides of your body?”

Kylo Ren blinked several times--and gurgled an unexpected laugh. And winced, his long fingers going back to his face. The fingertips were pressing around the rims of his eye sockets, and Hux could vividly remember doing exactly the same thing himself, as if pushing against the pain could make it ease up for a moment. 

Carefully, he got up--trying not to jar Ren too much with the movement. 

“Where are you going?”

Hux didn’t answer. The amenities in these suites were luxurious compared to the _Finalizer_ , but similarly laid out. He took a hand towel from the refresher and soaked it in ice-water, wringing most of the moisture out but leaving the chill, and came back over to the bed, where Ren was squinting at him between his pressing fingers. “Put this over your eyes,” he said, offering the towel. 

For a long moment Ren didn’t move, looking up at him--or at where he presumably thought Hux’s eyes were likely to be--and the aching uncertainty in his face did things to Hux’s insides which he would rather have blamed on the uninspired formal dinner. Then, slowly, Ren lowered his hands and let them lie loosely curled on his chest, rather than reaching for the towel. 

“Or don’t,” Hux said, crossly, aware that the tips of his ears were going red, and was about to turn and make a fast departure when one of Ren’s hands crept out, drifting over the bedclothes, to rest on the edge near where he had been sitting. 

There was no voice in his thoughts--Hux wondered if that hurt Ren to project, now, with his mind bruised--but the meaning was clear nonetheless, and his ears were still red as he sat back down. Ren’s mouth twitched in a little awkward smile, and he closed his eyes to let Hux cover them with the folded towel, catching his breath sharply at the sudden coldness. As Hux watched, though, some of the tension in the lines of his body began to ease: if only a little, still a little. 

When he left, moving very quietly so as not to disturb Ren, the corridors were empty; and this time when Hux regained his own quarters and took his boots off, sleep came almost at once.


	6. Chapter 6

He was back in the sim-scene holoproj suite. The recording was playing at what looked like half opacity, so that the gridwork of the floor and walls was visible through the projection, lending it a ghostly uncertain feel. The scene was familiar: one of the sixth-level multi-layer group scenes he’d done when he was about sixteen, centering on a hull-breach accident. Hux had run it first as a member of the squad and then as its leader, and it had taken him only three attempts as leader to get all his people out of there without losing anyone. Most cadets took at least five.

The first two attempts had been good, but he’d failed to take into account a couple of factors which prevented everyone from escaping the locked-down sector of the ship in the limited time they had before the emergency repair blew and sucked the rest of the atmo out of the sector. It helped that he was utterly familiar with the ship’s layout, and in fact his winning solution to this particular sim-scene relied on his knowledge of the engineering conduits behind the walls. Hux could remember shouting at a fellow cadet to shut up and crawl through the damn tube if he wanted to live, and the expression on the kid’s face when the lock behind them blew and the remaining air they’d been breathing a minute earlier was now an expanding cloud in vacuum. 

Now, for whatever reason, he was watching the scenario play out again. There was nobody with him in the simulated ship’s corridor, nobody’s face painted with the strobing red emergency lights as they looked to him for orders. Nonetheless Hux was conscious of the urgency of the situation, the need to get out of this corridor and move two levels down and one aft from his current location, where the nearest emergency pressure shelter offered protection. 

The familiar corridor was just as it had been all those years ago, except for the half-opaque projection that allowed him to see the walls of the suite beyond. He counted in his head, and hurried off down the hall in the direction he knew led to the way out, his boots clicking on the hard floor of the holoproj suite. Everything was just as he remembered--except, suddenly, awfully, the knowledge came to him that he _wasn’t_ alone. That someone else was here with him, and that he needed to get them out. Hux had no idea why he knew that. Chilly knowledge dropped straight into his brain was not a modality he was familiar with, but he was enough of a pragmatist to understand that this was a dream, and that things in dreams were allowed to make limited amounts of sense. 

_Okay_ , he thought, _which direction_ , and whatever had told him he was not alone responded with the information. The other way. Toward the rapidly-weakening emergency patch on the breached section of hull. 

Hux said something he would never have gotten away with saying out loud as a cadet, and turned on his heel, first walking fast and then trotting along the ghostly corridor. And then running. 

Door after door passed as he ran, half-seen through haste and low-level projection. Hux’s mental clock was pretty accurate most of the time, and he had a good idea of how many minutes he had left to find whoever it was and get them both off this level and out of this section before the hull blew. _Where are you?_ he yelled. _Where are you, we have to get out,_ and the third time he called out he got a reply. Weak, very weak, almost too soft to make out, but a voice nonetheless, coming from a side corridor. 

Hux skidded round the corner and found himself standing in part of the ship that was not in any holoproj scene he could remember: a huge, vast, cold, empty space like the audience chamber on Starkiller. There was no glowing image of Snoke, just the high dark reaches of an unseen ceiling, and--distantly, in the center of the chamber--a black crumpled form lying on the floor. 

_Hells_ , thought Hux, out of breath and almost out of time, and ran for the figure. It lay still, and as he approached he could make out black hair covering a white face, the shocking brightness of blood staining the skin. _Oh, hells_. 

Kylo Ren lay curled in a loose comma, his eyes fluttering open as Hux fell on his knees beside him and bent to give Ren a shake. “Can you stand?” Hux demanded. “We have to get out of here, there’s no time, the hull’s about to blow--”

“Leave me,” Ren rasped. 

Anger flared through Hux. “I’m not losing this level,” he said, and the anger gave him strength he had not been expecting; lifting Ren from the floor, Hux was distantly surprised at how little he weighed, how much of the presence was nothing more than black drapery and a weapons-grade sneer. “Hang on, and don’t say anything, and this might just be all right.”

The trip back through the dying ship, alarm klaxons echoing in the distance, red emergency lights painting bloody shadows over the body in his arms, seemed to take forever. Hux had lost his mental count, and he was sure at any moment they would hear the shriek and groan of tortured metal and the howl of escaping atmosphere, and find the world drawing away from them into cold and permanent darkness; but he ran on, Ren’s head bouncing against his chest, his breath tearing and burning in his lungs, and at some point Ren’s hand closed on a fold of his tunic and refused to let go; and when Hux finally reached the safety of the emergency shelter and tried to set him down, Ren held on tight. 

He subsided to the floor of the shelter, with Kylo Ren still cradled in his arms, and in the brightness of the shelter’s emergency light the droplets of blood in Ren’s dark hair gleamed like small and terrible stars. Like snowflakes. 

Hux breathed, and did not realize that he was not looking at blood, but tears; bright tears, gemming the darkness. Distantly he heard the howl and crash as the repaired hull gave way, and held Ren tighter, rocking a little with the force of his own panting breath. 

He woke, wrapped in a tangle of bedclothes, a pillow held tight in his arms, and stared into the darkness for a long unknowable stretch of time before unwinding himself and letting go. 

~

The next few days passed in an agony of uncertainty for Hux. After that first meeting with Snoke his interactions with the Supreme Leader had been brief, but most of his time was taken up with other meetings: many of his senior officers from the _Finalizer_ were being ordered to transfer to Snoke’s base in preparation for other assignments, and he had not yet been given his own assignment in sufficient detail for him to feel comfortable assuming he would still command the ship. 

He did not see Kylo Ren other than briefly, in passing, and that was limited to a helmeted exchange of nods. Hux tried very hard to forget the dream, and was only partially successful--and threw himself into the bureaucratic plod, as a desperate attempt to get the image of dark hair glimmering with tiny stars out of his head. 

On the fourth day Snoke summoned him once more, and he tried not to be too glad--or too alarmed--by the command.

“Supreme Leader,” he said, bowing. 

“General,” said Snoke. “The reports I have received of your performance on the _Finalizer_ are positive.”

Hux blinked. 

“And while my initial misgivings regarding your decision to delay your return were significant, I believe that based on further information you made the correct one.”

“Thank you,” he said. 

“However. While I appreciate your concern for the ship and its crew, I do not particularly appreciate your repeated insubordination. You should not have questioned my decision to arm the weapon to fire upon Ileenium, General Hux.”

He took the rebuke without flinching. “Yes, Supreme Leader. I apologize.”

“I don’t want your apologies,” said Snoke. “I want your service. You are a valuable officer and I have no intention of wasting your capabilities, but I feel a term of, shall we say, diminished responsibility might serve you well.”

Hux could feel his ears going red. He couldn’t entirely trust his voice, and bowed instead. 

“To which end,” Snoke continued, “I am sending you and Kylo Ren--who has also displeased me considerably--with a much smaller complement of officers and men to continue my search with a less overt show of force. The _Finalizer_ is difficult to ignore, General. I require you to be… _ignorable_.”

“Sir?” Hux said. 

“I wish you to keep an eye on Ren. He has much potential, but his...usefulness...has been compromised to me. It is possible that he may regain my favor. In the meantime, General, _I want that girl_.”

“The girl?”

“Indeed,” said Snoke. “If you find the girl, you will very likely find Skywalker. But a ship the size of my _Finalizer_ will not come upon them unawares. I am giving you a _Dissident_ -class light cruiser, with the appropriate complement of men and armament.”

Hux managed by dint of considerable effort to keep his face straight. “Sir,” he said again. 

“Your role on the _Finalizer_ will be taken over by Lieutenant-General Nield for the duration of this assignment,” Snoke said. “You might congratulate the new General Nield when you see her. It would be considered gracious.”

“Sir.”

“And General,” Snoke said, and this time there was unmistakable poisonous pleasure behind the words. “I would recommend you consider, going forward, asking yourself if the actions you propose to take would find approval with your father. Commandant Hux was an exemplary officer. You would do well to emulate that example.”

“Yes, Supreme Leader,” Hux said, and his bow and subsequent march out of Snoke’s presence would have been considered well above reproach even by Brendol Hux’s standards.

~

The _Dissident_ -class wasn’t a bad ship. It was just...small. Compared to commanding something the size of a city-state, being in charge of this thing felt rather as if he had been busted all the way down to private. Hux had given up trying not to mind. 

It was called the _Dark Heart_ , because somebody in charge of naming ships had an odd sense of humor, and Hux knew every inch of it after a few days of work. Unlike his _Finalizer_ it was actually possible to be familiar with almost everything on board, from the galleys to the shield generators to the gun emplacements to the sublight propulsion systems. The quarters were significantly shabbier and smaller than he was used to, but Hux found that the _Dark Heart_ ’s ECS had been set much higher than the _Finalizer’s_ \--possibly because it was easier to efficiently heat a comparably tiny ship--and that he did not shiver quite so much, or find it impossible to sleep well without all the blankets and his coat spread over him. 

He still didn’t have his coat back. Hux had put in a requisition for a new one, but had no illusions regarding the likelihood of any new uniform pieces being quickly issued to an officer in unofficial disgrace. Stalking around the _Dark Heart_ minus his coat wasn’t comparable to stalking around the _Finalizer_ , and not just because it was warmer: one simply could not get up a decent stalk with so few miles of corridor in which to do it. 

Ren had had no comment on their diminished fortune. He had simply nodded when Hux told him about the change of plans, and his “I know” had been flattened by the helmet’s vocoder to the point where no useful information could be gleaned from it. He had reported to the new ship without question and on time, and had refused Hux’s offer of a tour. 

_Fine_ , Hux had thought. _I’m here to keep an eye on you while we’re both being punished, but I’m not going to bother sticking my neck out to talk to you when it’s abundantly clear you don’t want to be talked at._ But he couldn’t get the images out of his head: bright glints of reflection gemming dark hair, pale fingers clinging to his tunic. 

Which was why, four days out of Snoke’s base on their way to follow up an intelligence lead in a distant system, it surprised the hell out of him when Kylo Ren knocked on his door. 

“What?” he demanded, looking up at Ren. 

“I believe this is yours,” the mask intoned. Hux realized he was holding something folded tightly in his arms, and looked down from the mask’s blunt snout to the bundle being offered, and blinked. 

“You’ve had my coat this whole time?”

“It’s a very nice coat,” Kylo Ren said. “As I’ve mentioned before.”

“What the...why…” Hux slumped against the doorframe. “Hells. Come in.”

Ren stayed where he was, for a moment longer, and then glanced down the corridor before ducking under the lintel and letting Hux close the door behind him. “Sit down,” Hux said, unfolding the coat, and couldn’t help putting it on at once, hugging the familiar folds around him. The bacta had been cleaned away: it was just as he remembered. 

“You dreamed,” Ren said, still behind the mask, which was pointed at the floor. 

“It happens,” Hux said. 

“You dreamed about me.”

“Yes,” he said, pulling the coat tighter. It felt stupidly, illogically wonderful. 

“You dreamed about saving me.”

“Are you going to sit there and make obvious and dreadfully awkward observations all evening?” Hux asked. “I’m not sure what it is you want from me.”

“Neither am I,” said Kylo Ren, and took off the mask. Underneath it he was as pale as usual, with that little unhealthy flush high on his cheekbones. His mouth was tight. “I should not want anything from you.”

“No,” Hux agreed.

“I do.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t...know what to do,” he said, and looked up at Hux, and something intense and indefinable closed inside Hux’s chest. 

“We have a job to do,” Hux said. “In another day we’ll be in the Kellan system. You’re supposed to be looking for the girl.”

Something just about as intense and indefinable passed across Ren’s features, and he looked away again. “Yes,” he said. “The girl.”

Hux dropped into a chair beside him, still wrapped in the coat. “Tell me about her. What happened back there? What was so terrible about your failure?”

“You really want to know?” Ren asked, his hair falling over his face. Hux had to squash a very, very inappropriate desire to reach out and relocate the dark waves. 

“Yes,” he said. “I think I need to know, if we are to work together.”

Ren looked at him, behind the hair, and a flurry of images flickered past Hux: Kylo Ren sneering at him, Kylo Ren lying in the bloody churned-up snow with stars in his hair, Kylo Ren hanging on to his hand as if to a lifeline; Kylo Ren huddled in the ruins of the bacta treatment center, healing Hux’s wrecked fingers with that extraordinary invisible warmth, drawling at him in the red dimness of his room on Snoke’s asteroid base, lying curled in the black emptiness of the chamber in his dream. Holding on to a handful of his tunic and refusing to let go. 

“Very well,” said Ren. “I will tell you. But...I warn you, General. It is a long story, and you will not be getting a great deal of rest this night.”

“I’ve done without sleep before,” said Hux. “I don’t want to subtract from the inherent drama of the situation, Lord Ren, but this will not actually represent the first time I’ve missed my set hours of rest.”

Ren stared at him, and then his mouth quirked in that awkward little smile, and his hands came up, running long fingers through his tumbled dark hair, and Hux was no longer amazed at how much, how utterly regrettably much, he wanted to touch that hair. “I don’t suppose you have anything to drink,” Ren said. “Only...this will not be pleasant.”

Hux got up and went to the cabinet, extracting a bottle of Luranian brandy. “The amenities do not run to cut-crystal tumblers, I’m afraid,” he said. “But I shall endeavor to bear the hardship, if you don’t mind.”

The smile was still awkward, but Hux thought it was warmer now. Ren’s mouth was startlingly soft, almost gentle, for someone who went around killing people with a red-glowing symbol of raw power; not for the first time Hux thought he could understand the necessity of the mask, even as he deplored it. 

“Very well,” Ren said again, and took the bottle--and their hands touched, briefly, but long enough for something like an electric shock to run through Hux, sending all the little hairs on his arms and legs standing out in an almost painful tingle. “I shall miss that coat, you know. --It begins a long time ago, when you were just a child.”

 _A long time ago_ , Hux thought. _In a far-off part of the galaxy_. He leaned forward, watching Kylo Ren, as he began at last to speak.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> illustrated by the fantastic [givenclarity](http://givenclarity.tumblr.com/)!

The bottle was almost empty when Hux woke, staring at it, his head resting on his folded arms on the table. He stared at it, the green dregs grinning back at him, and as memory slowly crystallized around a few specific seeds he sat up, and found himself alone. 

They had talked into the very small hours. At first it had been all Ren’s story to tell, and Hux had merely interjected a question here and there, a request for clarification; but once he had caught up to the death of Starkiller, the storytelling had gone from solo to occasional duet. 

~

“You know that my father was Han Solo,” Ren said. “I know you know that much.”

Hux simply nodded. 

“I killed him,” Ren said, holding Hux’s gaze. “I killed him dead. I looked into his face as I did it. I saw him understand what I had done, I, his son, _me_.”

Hux said nothing. There had been dreams, on the few occasions in his life when he had been ill enough to see terrible things through the haze of fever: Brendol Hux at the other end of a ceremonial rapier; Brendol Hux teetering on the rim of some immeasurable gulf, the emptiness yawning behind him; Brendol Hux in the cross-sights of a blaster rifle. Hux was fairly sure he had never actually said anything about it, out loud, because there would have been repercussions had he done so; but the dreams stayed locked in memory, as did the slight widening of his father’s cold blue bombardier’s eyes as he recognized and understood what was happening, and what was to be. He held Kylo Ren’s gaze, knowing that Ren could pick and choose from his memories at will.

“I thought,” said Ren, slowly, looking at him, “I thought that when he was dead, when I had done that thing, that the light would let me go. That it would be enough, finally enough, to complete my journey.”

“Snoke said that you were of particular interest because you contained a balance of light and dark,” Hux murmured. 

“Yes,” said Ren. “The...potential...of the light is powerful. But unstable. Snoke wanted me to face and overcome its seduction, so that I might be able to treat it objectively, to use its power without becoming weakened by the contact.”

“How does this even work?” Hux said. “I’ve always wondered. Is it like...positive versus negative voltage, or what? How does one distinguish between the dark and light? I don’t _understand_ , Ren, and I want to.”

“Yes,” said Ren again, more slowly. “Yes, you do want to understand. That is rare, General.”

“I’m not even sure if I ought to be called General at the moment,” Hux said, crossly running his fingers through his hair. “How about you just lose the title, for the sake of conversation?”

“Very well...Hux.”

“That’s better. Now go on, tell me about the sides. The valence.”

“‘Valence’ describes it inaccurately but roughly in psychological terms,” Ren said.

“I know. I’m not talking molecular bonds. Go on.”

“The Force...is an omnipresent energy field,” Ren said. “Consider it, if you will, roughly analogous to the electromagnetic fields surrounding every individual thing. Those who are sensitive to the Force are, with training and experience and a great deal of practice, capable of manipulating it to their own design.”

“It’s around us all the time?” Hux asked. “Right now?”

“Of course. Watch.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, and Hux felt a sort of shiver ripple through his own skin, several feet away; and then the brandy bottle on the table apparently decided the ship’s gravgen didn’t apply to it, and rose into midair, turning slowly on its long axis. Hux watched the green liquid slosh slightly as it moved.

“I am not doing a magic trick,” Kylo Ren said, almost gently. “I am merely influencing the Force as it applies to this particular object; its density relative to the air and the table has not changed, but I am exerting external upward pressure on it such that the gravitational field of the ship is no longer sufficient to hold it down. You may touch it,” he said. “In fact you might gain some experience by doing so.”

Hux, in his shirtsleeves, reached out to the hovering bottle, and felt a much more significant--if brief-- _frisson_ as his hand passed through some kind of invisible field surrounding the glass. It was similar to the crackling shiver one experienced when bearing a significant static charge, and in fact when he took his hand away and rested it on the table Hux expected a painful spark to snap between the metal and his fingertips, but nothing happened. 

“That is the Force,” Kylo Ren said, and the brandy bottle slowly descended, hanging in the air, and then settled back to the table as if nothing untoward had happened. “It is around us, even in the vacuum of space; it is eternal and unchangeable, but it has two complementary aspects, and that is where the concepts of dark and light come in.”

“So it isn’t just positive and negative phases of one sinusoidal signal,” Hux said. 

“No. Although the analogy does hold some value.” Ren reached out for the bottle--with his hand, this time--and took a long swig. “Both sides need to exist to balance one another. But it is possible for a user to influence, and be influenced by, only one side at a time; in fact, this is the principle that underlies the Jedi and the Sith. I am not Sith,” he added. “I do not...embrace the dark side in the manner that they did. But I am committed to the dark side nonetheless.”

“The Jedi are all about the positive voltage,” Hux said. 

“That is remarkably accurate while being technically wrong in almost every sense,” said Ren, and handed him the bottle. “They are strong with the light side of the Force and deliberately refrain from accessing the power and the strength of the dark side. Because of this abjuration they are required to work very hard indeed to shape and focus the light side of the Force. It is not an abjuration I would enjoy attempting.”

Hux drank deeply and set the bottle down, feeling his head sing, knowing this was utterly irresponsible and beneath his dignity and would almost certainly render the morning a very unpleasant experience, and squinted at Kylo Ren. “Is it a religion, then? They vow to renounce worldly things, and money, and the dark side?”

“Yes,” said Ren. “The Jedi are analogous to members of a holy order. Only the thing they worship is not just an idol, or an idea; it is real. It has power, and now that Skywalker has almost certainly been found by the Resistance, it is likely that we shall see its power close up.”

“So what’s Snoke’s angle on the light-and-dark thing?” he asked. “Why is it that your particular balance is so valuable?”

“It isn’t, now,” said Ren. “I was a hope of his, and that hope proved unsatisfactory. Now he is looking for a new hope, and I am to help find it, if I can.”

“You’re not his sidearm anymore?”

“No. I am yet...his creature. But the things he hoped I would be able to do are not...things I have done.”

“You were talking about your father,” Hux said, quietly.

“Yes. My father. He was not sensitive to the Force, but my mother is--and powerfully, although she has never trained as a Jedi, as my uncle did.”

“Skywalker,” said Hux.

“Yes.” Ren took another swig and sat back in his chair, long hands covering his face. “Luke Skywalker. Whose life was spared, at the last, by Darth Vader, and that single act of sentiment brought about the ultimate destruction of the Empire and all it had worked to create.”

“You did not want to make the same mistake Vader did,” Hux said, very slowly. “That’s why. But in the end it did not matter, and that is terrible to consider.”

“It is...beyond terrible,” said Ren, behind his hands. “Imagine what it would have been like had you given the command to fire, back on Starkiller, and everything you have spent your life working for turned out to be a failure. That the beam fired but could not do its intended work, or did not fire at all. Imagine that, Hux.”

He did. “What...happened next?”

“My father fell from the bridge. His companions were there, and Chewbacca shot me with his bowcaster, and…” He looked at Hux through the tumbled hair. “It is almost certain that the Wookiee had me in his sights during that entire conversation, and could easily have killed me with a single headshot. He did not. He only fired...afterward.”

 _Hells_ , Hux thought. “You knew the Wookiee, didn’t you.” He didn’t want to say _from your childhood._

“Yes,” said Ren, bleakly. “Yes, I knew him of old, and that he would not have hit me in the side had he been aiming for my head. He saw what I had done, and he could have shot to kill, and he did not.”

“And you wish he had,” said Hux. 

“Yes,” Ren said, again. “I wish he had.”

“Fair enough,” said Hux, and Ren sat up, still staring at him behind the hair. 

“What do you mean, _fair enough_?”

“Precisely what I said. What happened on Starkiller is what happened on Starkiller, and what you wish is what you wish, and pretending otherwise is not going to keep atmo in and vacuum out. I understand, Ren, at least the edges of it: I understand why one might wish that side-wound to have been a killing shot. But it wasn’t, and you’re stuck here, and I’m stuck here too, so we might as well accept it and try like hells to move on.”

Ren did a bit more staring. 

“Oh, for the sake of all space, do you think you’re the first man in history ever to have experienced failure? I’m...I...I have my own worries, damn it, and I’m not sulking behind a mask because of them.” He took a long swig, enjoying the sweet fire in his throat as the brandy went down. “I’m sulking in private, behind closed doors, which is much more decorous.”

“You’re drunk,” said Ren.

“Full marks for observation, that man.”

“I should go.”

“You should go,” Hux agreed. “Leave the coat.”

“It’s a very nice coat,” said Ren, yet again. “Even if it doesn’t fit me.”

“You’ve been wearing my coat?” He looked at Ren, not exactly surprised, not sure _what_ he was.

“It was cold,” Ren said. “I...couldn’t sleep, without it.”

“Oh, _hells_ ,” said Hux, to the accompaniment of worlds breaking, and reached across the small but terrible distance between them, and touched Ren’s hair. It was exactly as thick and soft as it had been every time he had failed to prevent himself imagining doing just this very thing. There were no snowflakes starring its blackness, and he was glad of that; at least this particular memory would not settle in and augment all the memories of bright spangles in darkness which he had been trying so very hard not to recall. It was soft, and warm to his touch, and when he sank his hand into the dark waves Kylo Ren actually leaned against his hand, nudging with a kind of quivering awkward intensity, and Hux cupped his fingers against the curve of Ren’s skull and shivered violently when Ren’s hands came up to hold his wrist.

He felt as if something almost painfully hot and bright were spilling over inside his chest, as if some cup were running over with bright liquid gold--and yet, and yet, and _yet_ there was enough left of his conscious mind to fight through the hot gold flood of _yes_ and force him to uncurl his fingers and let go. _Not now_ , the implacable voice of sensibility insisted. _Not now._ His whole body creaked with the effort, but he managed, and as soon as he had drawn back a little distance from Kylo Ren the desperate desire to go on touching him faded back to simple misery, and not unbearable compulsion.

“I should not have done that,” he said, rubbing at his hand as if he’d touched something very hot. “I apologize.”

“Not at all,” said Kylo Ren, whose own hand kept rising as if to touch the hair Hux had just been touching, and falling away again. “Your apology is accepted, only…”

“Only what?”

The overflowing gold in Hux’s chest flared again, suddenly, and he could hear the voice in his mind: _Only don’t stop, next time, I do not think that I can bear it._

Dumbly he stared at Kylo Ren, and made no move to stop him when he got up, weaving slightly, and put his mask back on. “Good night,” Ren said. 

“Good night.” It was automatic. 

When the door hissed shut behind Ren, Hux sat staring at it for a long, long time. 

~

The hangover _developed_ , sort of like an old-time lightgraph soaking in its chemicals. When Hux had woken, it had been nothing more than dull exhaustion and headache, but by midmorning he was feeling absolutely miserable. The only consolation was that Ren probably felt just about as bloody as he did, and that was as far as Hux was willing to go on the Thinking About Ren spectrum. He stood on the bridge as the _Dark Heart_ shuddered her way out of lightspeed, as the vague tunnel of bluish light resolved itself into streaks that shrank into individual stars, and stared down at the planet they had been sent to investigate. 

Kellan IV was a small ice planet, about as inhospitable as Starkiller had been, but with much less geological surface variety; it was almost all sweeping plains of tundra, with belts of forest here and there. The only settlers were the hardiest of opportunists, here for the wealth of dagonium, a particularly rare mineral found in deep veins beneath the icy surface. Hux and the _Dark Heart_ were here because part of Snoke’s vast and utterly dark spynet had reported unexpected activity and a jump in the rate of dagonium ore entering the market. Since dagonium was almost exclusively used for alloys required in the construction of Force-containment structures, the change suggested that someone, somewhere, was building a lot of things designed to keep the Force either _in_ or _out_ , and that the construction of a new Jedi Temple might well coincide with such a need. 

From high orbit, though, it looked about as unappealing as a planet with breathable atmo was capable of looking, its ice-white hide ridged and scarred with uncountable crevasses. It was much too bright, and Hux wished for once that he had a stupid mask so _he_ could control the amount of light hitting his eyeballs. 

“Take us in,” he said. “I want synchronous orbit on the other side of the planet from the main settlements. I will take the shuttle down to the surface once we are parked.” 

_The_ shuttle. Because they had one. Or one that was currently working. On the _Finalizer_ he had had a choice of ships, small and large, including the _Upsilon_ -class shuttle Ren favored. On the _Dark Heart_ you had the equivalent of an old _Lambda_ -class triple-wing. And you liked it. 

Kylo Ren strode onto the bridge, just then: not walked, not ambled, sauntered, or even stalked, but _strode_ , and Hux found himself hoping that Ren felt every iota as wretched as he did underneath all the trappings and the suits. “And Lord Ren will accompany me,” he said.

Hux was almost able to convince himself that this was a tactically intelligent maneuver for lots of reasons, and if one of them was "if I have to risk frostbite on this stupid, pointless punitive assignment, so does he", then so be it.

~

_"It was cold. I...couldn't sleep, without it."_


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> illustrated by the fantastic [givenclarity](http://givenclarity.tumblr.com/)!

The trip down through Kellan IV’s atmosphere was just as nasty as Hux expected, their shuttle juddering and creaking as the forces built up around them. Brilliant violet-pink plasma flashed past the viewports, and Hux imagined he could _feel_ the ship shouldering its way down through friction, slowing until at last they were through the worst of it and could deploy the shuttle’s lateral wings to enter controlled atmospheric flight. The stability increased as soon as the wing foils locked into place, and Hux let go his death-grip on the arms of the seat. Beside him Kylo Ren hadn’t moved throughout the descent, and his hands lay quietly in his lap, as if all of this were no more exciting than a staff meeting.

They touched down in the cover of one of Kellan IV’s forest belts, reasonably sure that their presence on-planet had not yet been noted. The wind had an edge on it like a vibroblade, driving the light snowfall against their faces; Hux was glad of his greatcoat even as he watched the troopers shouldering their emergency packs. The packs carried a rudimentary shelter and enough rations to last an adult a day or so, if they didn’t mind being hungry. He didn’t intend to go far enough from the shuttle to need one. 

The snow was about halfway to his boot-tops. Hux resented everything about this assignment, and made himself and his men march rather more quickly than was efficient to the edge of the scarp, where they could overlook the little settlement through the drifting veils of white. He was aware of Ren struggling through the snow with no more grace than he himself could manage, and was meanly pleased. 

Then it was time to get some work done, and Hux directed the squad to their individual positions, circling the little settlement below using the weather for cover and gathering what intel they could. They vanished into the snow at his command, and Hux was a little impressed at just how good they really were, and how much he appreciated the reminder that men trained under his rules were, in fact, effective; that not everything he had done had been a waste of time. 

He peered down at the tiny settlement through his binoculars. Someone down there was running a lot of dagonium off this horrible little rock, and if he found out who, he would be that much closer to discovering where Luke Skywalker and Ren’s mysterious girl had gone. His headache was not fading as time went by: in fact it seemed to be intensifying, and the sharp edge of this particular atmosphere hurt his throat, made his chest ache as he breathed, even as his fingers and toes first burned with cold and then went numb. _You deserve the headache_ , he told himself. _You decided to stay up all night talking to Kylo bloody Ren and drinking yourself stupid, this is exactly what you bought, so own it._

But he wasn’t doing a tremendously effective job at not minding, and the comm was silent; and as the afternoon wore on and the snowstorm changed from heavy flakes to a swirling almost-impenetrable wall of white, as the cold bit deeper and deeper into him, Hux’s intensifying misery began to slick over with the edges of fear.

He could not make his way back to the shuttle in this: he would just as easily find himself walking off the edge of a cliff, or trudging determinedly farther and farther away from the ship with every step. Without the emergency shelter he had no way to escape the sharpening wind, and when he tried again to raise any of the others on the comm Hux found that the cold had sucked the batteries dry, that he might as well be talking into a brick. 

Slowly the gravity of the situation descended upon him, but after a while he found himself not caring so very much. Not minding much at all. At least it was...peaceful, here. Hux could think of worse places to be: no one was _actively_ trying to kill him, for once. 

He was not sure how much time had passed when Kylo Ren materialized out of the blowing snow, a black featureless figure. His fluttering robes made Hux think of crows’ wings. “Come with me,” Ren said--or shouted, over the rising wind.

“What have you found?” Hux’s voice didn’t seem to want to work at first, and he had to clear his throat, which hurt, and try again before he could get the words out. 

“The temperature’s dropping too rapidly,” Ren said, bending over him, a creature out of nightmare in the mask and hood. “We underestimated the weather on this planetoid. I’ve made contact with the squad, they’re dug in safely in their shelters. We have to wait this out, there’s no way we can move in a storm this heavy.”

Hux blinked up at him, realizing that the reason his vision was wonky was because he had snow in his eyelashes, snow was _everywhere_ , he was covered in it; that he must have....dozed off, lost time while the snow intensified. He was so cold he had given up shivering. Everything hurt. 

“Come on,” Ren said impatiently, holding out his hand, and Hux saw himself reaching for it, almost felt the contact, but for some reason he didn’t seem able to move beyond a clumsy lurch in Ren’s direction. 

He heard Ren say several things he had never expected to hear in that vocoder’s measured delivery, and then an arm like an iron bar was around his shoulders, another beneath his knees, and he was plucked from the snow like a plum from a tree and carried, held close to Ren’s chest. This seemed so improbable a situation that Hux found himself convinced he was imagining it, even down to the details--Ren’s breathing rasping behind the mask, the pain that jarred through his own body with each stride Ren took--and he did not mind at all when everything went away for a little while. 

~

The next time he was aware of being conscious was in a small, enclosed space--almost claustrophobic--that was dark and vaguely blue. Everything hurt. The tips of his fingers and toes, his ears, his nose, his mouth burned as if they’d been dipped in acid. All his muscles hurt, aching as if he’d used every last one of them in some titanic yet apparently unmemorable struggle.

“Lie still,” someone said, and Hux wanted to point out that he _was_ lying still, that movement was not currently a thing he felt to be within his personal skill set, but all he managed was a _nngh_.

“You’ll be all right,” said the someone. “You have some frostbite, but it isn’t serious, and the hypothermia is responding. Can you drink?”

Hux considered. It seemed like an awful lot of information to parse at once, and he blinked up at the figure bending over him, and wished it weren’t so dark and that his eyeballs didn’t ache. “Ren,” he said. “It’s you.”

“Full marks for observation,” said the shape, sounding amused. “Here.”

He was lifted, again, by that iron bar of an arm, and found the cup being offered contained the horrible orange-flavored electrolyte mixture from the emergency kit’s supplies, but it was hot--or warm, he didn’t care, it contained heat--and he swallowed it greedily. He was surprised to find the sweetness not so much cloying as piercing, intense, like a single note played on a violin, hanging for a long time before slowly beginning to fade away. 

“You found me,” he said, when Ren took the empty cup away and let him lie back on the emergency-kit bedroll. 

“It wasn’t very difficult,” Ren said. “You think noisily even when you’re beginning to die of cold. Don’t do that, by the way.”

“Do what?”

“Die.”

“I’ll try not to,” he said, feeling a little more himself as the sweet warmth of the mixture began to work its way outward. “What happened? What went wrong?”

“Nothing,” said Ren. “Just a storm that blew up much more... _intensely_...than anyone anticipated. You didn’t do anything wrong, except for not carrying one of the emergency packs yourself. That was a foolish decision.”

“This assignment is my responsibility,” said Hux. He was beginning to be able to make out details now: the roof of the emergency shelter above them, Kylo Ren busily doing something over the hiss of the tiny stove. As he watched, Ren tucked a lock of dark hair impatiently behind his ear, and Hux shivered all over with something that was not physical chill. “I should have foreseen that the weather could become dangerous, and planned accordingly. It’s my fault,” he said. 

“It’s not anybody’s fault,” Ren said. “As far as any of us can tell it ought to stop within a few hours, and once it’s over we’ll be able to regroup. Personally I want to get off this wretched iceball with all speed, but I doubt you’ll let us leave without squeezing _some_ information out of it. In any case, nobody is going anywhere right now.”

The wind shook the curved bow of the shelter’s roof, and Hux shivered again, hard. “I...don’t feel well,” he said, an admission that ought to have been accompanied by a trumpet fanfare for its sheer rarity. It was not a statement Hux considered permissible for himself to make, under ordinary conditions.

“I’m not surprised,” said Ren. “You’re getting over hypothermia; I think you are allowed to feel at least moderately dreadful. Do your fingers and toes still hurt?”

“No,” he said, wiggling them. “Or not more than everything else does.”

“Good.” Ren leaned over him and did something to a tiny control panel, and whatever was draped over Hux hummed slightly and began to warm up further. He realized that his greatcoat was spread over the thermal cover, and thought of Ren saying _I couldn’t sleep without it._

“You came to find me,” he said again, determined to address the issue. 

“Of course I did.”

“And you’re...helping me.”

“You appear to need it.” 

“I didn’t know you could do…” He wanted to wave his hand vaguely at the situation, the shelter, the emergency first-aid, but couldn’t face the work involved in extracting a hand to wave with. “This.”

“I have a few useful skills that do not involve my lightsaber, which should come as a relief to you since you find it so objectionable.”

“It’s stupid,” Hux said, petulantly. “Your lightsaber.”

“So you’ve mentioned. I can put up a tent and use an emergency stove and even mix up instant orange drink powder without needing to have recourse to the instructions. My powers are vast.” 

Hux looked up at him, his throat tightening. “Thank you.”

He still wasn’t good with details, and in any case the shelter was wolf-dark and he could only barely make out Kylo Ren’s face through the shadows, but he thought something passed across that face, at the words.

_You’re welcome_ , said a voice inside his head. 

Hux nodded, feeling some huge and critical weight drawing down to a very tiny point, feeling an immense potential force precariously balanced, ready to be tipped one way or the other by the lightest of touches. _This is a choice_ , he thought, amazed at the clarity of his own perception despite the pain, the last weeks of confusion crystallizing all at once into glass-clear understanding. _This is always a choice, and it is mine, now, to make or not to make; this is not in anyone else’s gift or command; not Snoke’s, not my father’s, but my own._

Ren was watching him, unreadable as usual. Hux swallowed hard. “What you said, before,” he managed. 

“Which part?”

Hux closed his eyes tightly, took a deep and painful breath, and tipped the balance. “Last night, on the ship,” he said, feeling the weight began to fall. “You said... _next time, don’t stop._ ”

“Yes. Well. I was--”

“Come _here_ ,” said Hux, as imperiously as he could manage, reaching up; and there were no responding words inside his head, just an incoherent flash of that golden overflowing heat, as Kylo Ren bowed his head to let Hux’s trembling fingers touch his hair--and as Kylo Ren lay down beside him, pulling the thermal covers, and Hux’s coat, over them both. 

Something inside Hux that had been glazed with ice for years--for so many years he had forgotten what it had been like _not_ to freeze--was cracking now, shards of ice spalling away, terrifying and unstoppable and irreparable, filling his mind and heart with sharp jagged edges. For a terrible moment he could not breathe, cold clear ice in his chest where air should be; and then Kylo Ren’s heart was beating under his cheek, Kylo Ren’s arms were around him, and he felt that bright liquid gold begin to rise again inside his chest: spilling over, flooding through the frozen pathways and passages of his body, washing away the pain and fear and cold, leaving spreading warmth in its place. 

This time he could not have stopped, could not have pulled away even had he tried: this was much, much stronger than Hux was, much stronger than the both of them. He lay against Ren’s chest and simply breathed; and breathing did not feel quite so much like a tiresome chore as it had come to do just recently. The terrible weight in its precarious balance was gone, shattered into a million stars and borne away on the crest of the flood. He said nothing; words were a little beyond Hux at the moment. There didn’t need to be words, not in the face of such a breathtaking sense of relief, of _yes, finally_. Of--after a long, long, weary journey--reaching a familiar port; of coming home.

He could not think, and did not try; it was enough to know that Ren’s arms were wrapped tightly around him, that it was Ren’s heart he listened to, his cheek pressed against Ren’s chest. That there was no place in the entire galaxy he would rather be, just at the moment, held and sheltered and...understood, despite everything, alive with warmth in a world of black and bitter cold.

~

When he woke he was not at all sure where he was. Cold blue light filled the tiny space in which he lay--in which _they_ lay, Hux slowly allowed himself to realize, and his chest ached in a way that had nothing to do with physical pain. They were in the shelter, in the snow, and that meant it was real: everything had been real. Giving up had been real, finally running out of strength to _not_ make the choice, feeling the weight of the decision even as he made it, to reach out and touch--and be touched. Held. He’d fallen asleep almost at once, secure and cradled, his mind full of bright warm gold.

He lay curled up on his side, minus his boots, still wrapped up in Kylo Ren’s arms, his own recently-reacquired coat covering them both; and Hux was conscious of still being wonderfully, illogically, magically warm. He felt both weak and exhausted, as if he was only now waking from some long and painful illness, or had just done something that had taken all of his strength, but warm nonetheless. And he was conscious, moreover, of being fortunate enough to get a good look at Ren while he was still sleeping, before he put his daily armor on. 

It was a strange face, Hux thought, aware that he had a lot more to worry about than his personal appreciation of Kylo Ren’s features, but pushing that away with practiced compartmentalization: worry could come later. Right now he wanted to observe Ren in peace: a strange face, not what you might expect to find beneath that mask. The wound that ran across his forehead and down one cheek had healed to a scar amazingly quickly, but even so it was still angry pink, the skin shiny and puckered. Just the ends of it were beginning to fade into white. It didn’t...take away from the overall effect, Hux thought, so much as change it, like a shift between major and minor keys. Ren before the scar had been interesting to look at; Ren with the scar was _different_ , but still interesting.

Hux had to exert quite a lot of willpower to prevent himself reaching out to run a finger along the scar’s length, and hastily refocused his attention on Ren’s face as a whole. The dramatic prow of a nose and the heavy eyebrows didn’t seem to go naturally with the soft, almost gentle mouth. Ren was pale, terribly pale, but Hux was coming to understand that that was ordinary, for him; that the worrisome tinge of color high on each cheekbone did not necessarily mean anything was more wrong than usual. The pale skin was touched with little dark spots here and there, not unlike the spray of freckles that appeared across his own face with even a brief exposure to sunlight. 

Ren’s hair was much too long, and not black at all; at least not in this light, not entirely. It was dark, dark brown, like his eyebrows, like his eyelashes, and so heavy Hux could not imagine how he bore it, that rich thick heaviness falling into his eyes, curling at the nape of his neck. 

Most of all, though, Hux noticed the dark weary shadows under Ren’s eyes, the lines of tension that would not completely relax even in sleep. When had he last had any decent rest, Hux thought, and realized it had to have been before everything fell apart. Before all that he had worked for was taken away. Unconsciousness in a bacta tank, and bad sleep snatched in cold bunks, didn’t really count: what Ren needed was proper sleep in a decent bed, and one that was warm enough for once. 

He had a sudden absurd mental image of--somehow--running away with Kylo Ren. Escaping together, fleeing across the galaxy to find somewhere safe where their names and faces meant nothing, somewhere out of the reach of Snoke and the First Order and all the rest of it, somewhere Ren could _sleep_ well and warmly, without fear. 

Hux pushed the thought away, to be dealt with later when he had time to worry about everything in general, but hints of it lingered in the back of his mind. He found himself staring at Ren’s face with almost desperate intensity, needing to memorize each feature as it was now, like this, not in a ship’s red emergency lights, not hidden behind the mask. It surprised him a little when Ren stirred, and the heavy eyelashes parted, and Hux found himself being watched: it felt odd, as if he’d been caught sneaking something forbidden.

“You think much too loudly,” said Ren, smiling a little, and his hand crept up to cup Hux’s cheek. “It’s like someone next door shouting at the top of their lungs. Or singing grand opera, as I believe I’ve pointed out.”

Hux shivered, pressing his face into the touch. “Sorry,” he said. “Did I wake you, thinking?”

“Not entirely,” Ren said, running his thumb lightly over Hux’s cheekbone. “But you do think an awful lot about my face, just recently. I can’t imagine why.”

He felt the tips of his ears going red. “I can’t help it,” he said. “It’s easy to think about.”

“You _like_ my face,” said Ren, as if trying to parse the concept. 

“Well, _yes_ ,” said Hux. “Obviously.”

“Why?”

“What?” He scowled. “Why? It’s...are you really asking me this or are you just trying to get a rise out of me?”

Ren laughed, and Hux was a little surprised to find that he was capable of sounding just like anybody else, not particularly sinister or dangerous or intense, just...like someone laughing, mask and stupid lightsaber and persona notwithstanding. “I’m asking you,” Ren said, his fingertips now tracing Hux’s eyebrow. 

“I like your face because it’s _yours_ ,” said Hux, trying to think past that wonderfully distracting touch. “And because you’re beautiful.” It was not at all the sort of thing he would have been able to say a month ago, and the words still felt new and unfamiliar in his mouth, but he meant every syllable.

“I’m not, though,” said Ren, his fingertips still drifting lightly over Hux’s face. “Even without the scar.”

“Yes you are. Don’t dispute my observational skills, Ren, it’s rude. Do you have any idea how many times I’ve wanted to touch your hair? I keep thinking of you with snow caught in it.”

“I can’t understand why,” Ren said, but there was that flicker of hot gold in the back of Hux’s mind. “It’s just hair.”

“Yes,” Hux said patiently, “but it’s _your_ hair. I’m...not going to get the time to explain that in detail, am I?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Ren. “We’ll be found in approximately...seventeen minutes, I believe. You should probably put your boots back on and start looking officious. I don’t think we have a comb, though. You’ll have to do the best you can.”

“Seventeen minutes?”

“Sixteen and a half.”

“Hells,” said Hux. “Forgive me for not being very good at this, will you?”

“Good at what?”

“This,” said Hux, and took Kylo Ren’s face between his hands, and pulled him close, and kissed him.


	9. Chapter 9

It was not a good kiss. It wouldn’t have been a good kiss even if both participants had _not_ been half-frozen and squashed together in a space designed to hold one stormtrooper plus armor and camping stove: Hux’s applicable experience was extremely limited, and Ren was apparently too surprised to do anything at all. 

When Hux let him go he had color in his face, clear blood under the pale skin, not just those two touches high on his cheeks. He was staring at Hux, eyes wide--in this light, Hux couldn’t make out iris from pupil, they just looked like black holes--and didn’t say anything, for long enough that dread had begun to crystallize in Hux’s chest. When at last the voice came, it was not out loud but directly into his mind, and he had _never_ heard it sound so incoherent: _Did...you just...did that...did I..._

 _Yes_ , he thought. 

_Oh,_ said Ren, and blinked. 

_Oh what?_ The dread was still there, crystal-sharp edges waiting to spread.

 _Oh,_ good.

And then Ren’s hands, Ren’s long fingers--musician’s fingers, Hux thought, out of nowhere--drew him close again, and Ren’s mouth found his, and it was only because stormtrooper boots were very loud indeed as they crunched through fresh snowfall that the two of them had sufficient time to let go of one another and try to look presentable before the squad arrived. Ren had the benefit of his mask; Hux had never envied it so much, working to school his features into their normal mildly-disapproving expression. _Officious_ , Ren had called it. Well, he could live with _officious._

It didn’t help that the stupid escapade in the snow had taken much more out of Hux than he had realized. When the shelter was uncovered and its entrance unsealed--letting in shockingly bright sunlight and a stab of bitter cold--he crawled out without too much difficulty, but found he could not get to his feet without assistance. All the strength seemed to have run out of his legs, like water from a sack, and he was again very much aware that _everything_ hurt, as if he had somehow pulled every single muscle in his body at once. “Damn,” he said, leaning rather heavily on the trooper who had pulled him to his feet. The others moved a little closer.

“Are you all right, sir?”

“I’m fine,” Hux said, “just a little…”

“General Hux is recovering from a bout of hypothermia,” said Ren, through the mask. Hux turned to see him deftly disassembling their shelter, as if he did this sort of thing all the time. It was very much not a skill he had ever imagined Kylo Ren bothering to learn. 

“ _Has_ recovered,” Hux said, still leaning on the trooper, and made an effort to stand up properly. He managed, with a slight wobble. “Past tense. What about the rest of the squad? Have 35 and 42 reported in yet?” 

“Yes, sir. They found something last night before the storm got too bad to move, they’re checking it out and will meet us back at the shuttle.” 

“They found something?” Hux repeated. “Did they say what?”

“Possible ID on a couple of the ships located at the settlement, ones with hyperdrive capability. Could be a lead.”

Hux stared at the trooper, whose helmet--of course--gave nothing away. “That’s commendable work,” he said, astonished at the concept of this abortive little mission actually having produced anything but embarrassment. “Extremely commendable under the circumstances. Okay, let’s move. I want to get everyone back to the shuttle and off this rock before someone notices we’re here.” _You_ will _stay upright_ , he told himself firmly. _You_ will not _lean on anybody’s arm like a doddering ancient, and you_ will not _fall over at any point. This is non-negotiable._

 _You don’t sound like yourself when you do that,_ Ren said silently. _Can you keep it down, though? I’d rather you weren’t yelling directly in my ear._

Hux blinked. _I’m not yelling_.

 _You really, really are,_ said Ren, and a moment later Hux was astonished to note that Kellan IV’s gravity seemed to have suddenly reduced its pull in his immediate vicinity--or that some opposing influence had decided to step in on his behalf. He stumbled, caught off guard, and the something caught and steadied him before he could go face-first into the snow. The nearest trooper stopped, reaching out a hand.

“General? Sir...are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine,” he said, standing up straight, buoyed by the invisible support, blinking. “Carry on.”

The trooper eyed him doubtfully for a moment longer--Hux could identify doubtful eyeing even through the helmets, at this point--and Hux let his expression harden. That was enough: he didn’t have to repeat _carry on_. The line of them--in single file, walking in the footsteps the person ahead had forced through the snow--began once more to move. 

_You’re doing that_ , he thought, not looking back at Ren, who was bringing up the rear. _With your brain. You’re, what, letting me lean on you?_

 _It’s interesting that you see it that way,_ Ren said. _I am enabling your self-centered desire not to show weakness in front of your troops._

_With your brain._

_With my brain, in a manner of speaking._

_And it’s not desire, anyway, it’s determination_ , Hux added. _What do you mean, “self-centered”?_

There was no way for someone to convey eye-rolling without visible eyeballs, but Kylo Ren was doing so nonetheless, inside Hux’s mind. The sensation was remarkable. _Precisely what I said,_ Ren told him. _Many of the motives underlying your actions are profoundly self-centered. This is not, in itself, a bad thing._

Hux was getting a headache, on top of everything else. Communicating completely by...the equivalent of talking to oneself and being overheard, he supposed...was surprisingly tiring. Or perhaps not so surprisingly; he had no frame of reference. 

_It is like any other form of communication. It requires, and uses, energy. Which you don’t have much of, at the moment; I recommend you stop trying._

_I have so many questions._

_I know,_ said Ren, and there was such uncharacteristic gentleness in the voice that Hux felt his throat tighten. _There will be time for them later._

He let it go at that, concentrating on walking steadily, and when the shuttle came in sight Hux had never been so glad in his entire life to see the distinctive white triple foils of a _Lambda_ -class. The shuttle--white on white, against a field of white--was actually the ideal vehicle for this particular application, Hux realized belatedly. He wished he’d thought of claiming that the choice had been strategic, rather than because it was the only thing the _Dark Heart_ had on board that he’d trust not to break down halfway through a mission. It ought to have a name, Hux thought, somewhat incoherently, as they climbed the ramp. Things ought to have names. 

At this point he realized that he was, in fact, not operating at peak efficiency, mind-wise, and he didn’t argue when Kylo Ren suggested that debriefing the squad was a task he could manage without Hux’s supervision. It was very nice to sit down, even in the shuttle’s unyielding seats, and he was content to close his eyes and think of nothing at all. 

~

It turned out that troopers FN-2042 and FN-2035 had, indeed, managed to grab a positive ID on one of the vessels parked on the outskirts of the Kellan IV mining settlement, despite the weather, and a likely-but-not-positive on another. Tracing the registrations of the ships through the undoubtedly complicated network of identities and fronts was not their job: as soon as they reached the _Dark Heart_ , Hux and Ren had put in the call to Snoke’s base with the information. It would be investigated by the same dark intelligence web that had led them to the Kellan system in the first place. 

Hux had insisted on being there for the transmission, and Kylo Ren had not argued: it was, objectively, wiser for both of them to be active participants in this particular report. As soon as the channel was closed, however, he let himself be escorted down to the _Dark Heart_ ’s medbay without further protest. 

The rest of the day passed in a series of somewhat hazy moments, with no real sense of how much time was passing. The ship’s doctor and a mismatched bevy of medical droids--hells, Hux thought vaguely, they really _had_ scraped the bottom of the barrel to outfit _this_ ship, but that wasn’t the droids’ fault and anyway he couldn’t focus clearly enough to finish the end of that thought--did various mildly painful and undignified things. Eventually they seemed to have finished poking and prodding and beeping, and Hux was allowed to return to his own quarters with firm instructions to rest, and the promise that he would be more or less back to normal--if sore--in the morning. The idea that he was sore all over--that what felt like every single muscle he owned was aching--because he’d been _shivering_ so hard was a little astonishing to Hux. 

His bed--a bunk, really, nothing more luxurious than that--had never looked quite so inviting. Hux wondered where his coat had gone, and realized it was probably still down in the medbay, and the idea of attempting to go all the way back there to fetch it seemed as impossible as climbing a mountain, in his current state, or possibly flapping his arms and taking flight. He merely crawled under the covers, coatless, curled up on his side, and fell almost immediately asleep. 

~

He woke, briefly, when something familiar and heavy was draped over him, and had a confused impression of black eyes in a white face, of a soft touch ghosting over the skin just above his eyebrow, before sleep claimed him again. The next time he woke, his head was clear, or almost, and Kylo Ren was sitting at his desk reading his datapad. 

“Hey,” he said, and raised himself on an elbow, partially dislodging his coat, which someone had spread over him at some point. “That’s mine.”

“Yes,” said Ren, looking up. “Of course it’s yours, we’re in your room. How are you feeling?”

“You don’t just _read_ other people’s _datapads_ , Ren,” he said, tugging the coat back over himself. “There are private things on there.”

“I was bored,” said Ren, putting it down and coming over to the bunk. “Anyway, your private settings aren’t particularly scandalous. You do have a _lot_ of storage space taken up by music, I must say.”

Hux looked up at him. “See, this is why people don’t like you. One of the reasons. Other than the ways you work tremendously hard to be unlikable, which, as I may have mentioned, are legion. Just because you _can_ look into people’s heads, or their private data storage settings, does not mean you _should_.”

“Does it bother you?” Ren said, and sat down on the edge of the bunk. In this light his eyes were brown, not black, and brushstrokes of light were caught in his hair. He still wore the layers and layers of robes, but had taken off his tattered cowl and hood, and the change made him look--not _ordinary_ , nothing could do that--but less like a character playing a part.

“Yes,” said Hux, with a cloudless smile, and reached up to him. “Yes, it does.” 

“I see,” Ren said, and leaned over, let himself be pulled down, and Hux thought through the helpless rather terrifying flood of happiness that the learning curve on kissing seemed to be _steep._

It didn’t last long--he thought perhaps it couldn’t, that he might actually break somehow under such an abnormal, prolonged experience of enjoyment. It felt almost like his familiar worry-and-exasperation knot of weight, of pressure in his chest, but where that was a force squeezing _in_ , pushing relentlessly at the tip of his breastbone, this was a sense of warmth and expansion. Of something inside him, something hot and bright rising, spilling over, boundless--and terrifying therefore in its simple alien unpredictability. He did not know what to make of it, or whether it was dangerous, or what its limits were--and yet the exhilaration it brought made this seem more exciting than appalling.

Ren had said, _You think too much_. Maybe he did, Hux considered, feeling his ribcage creak with illogical joy. It did not seem so necessary, thinking, not right now. But he did not protest when Ren gently disengaged, pulled back. 

Ren was pink in the face again, and Hux thought his eyes were perhaps brighter than usual, and his mouth was twitching in a little series of what looked like unintentional smiles. That was good: that was all, very, good. He could not bear to break all contact, though, and Hux captured Ren’s hand in both of his, and held it to his chest, like a prize. 

He was not going to ask what was happening to them, in case asking somehow broke a spell, alerted some authority to this breaking of some rule--because this _had_ to be breaking rules, and not just the ones he had known since he could walk. If he didn’t ask questions, if he didn’t tip the universe off to some oversight, then this could keep on happening. Whatever it was. 

Hux knew, in the back of his mind, that he was going to _have_ to think about it properly, to try and work out what things meant and what the ramifications would be, but right now Kylo Ren was looking down at him _like that_ and he held Kylo Ren’s hand tight in both of his, and _later_ for reason. Later. 

“You think--” Ren said, and he interrupted. 

“Too much. Yes. I do. Don’t let me.”

“Ah, there you might have found the limit of my power,” said Ren, lacing his fingers with Hux’s, gently, so gently. He could remember those fingers crushing his own in an extremity of pain, with Starkiller dying below them and a universe full of uncertainty ahead. As the image flickered through his mind, Ren winced. “I really _am_ sorry about that. I can’t understand why you didn’t get it seen to straight away.”

“Don’t be,” said Hux. “It wasn’t your fault. And you repaired it.” He called up the mental image of that astonishing warmth sinking into his wounded hand and undoing the hurt, and Ren blinked, and then smiled again. 

“Very well,” he said. “I’ll try,” and bent over their clasped hands, and brushed Hux’s fingers lightly with his lips. It was such a delicate touch that he almost could not believe Ren was behind it--and then remembered the whisper-touch on his forehead, in the half-waking haze of before.

“Thank you,” he said. 

“What for?”

“A lot of things. Coming to find me in the snow, for one.”

“You found me,” said Ren. 

“So I did,” he agreed. “Don’t let’s make a habit out of that. Don’t get lost in the snow, will you?”

“You have my word.”

“Good,” he said. “And thank you for...holding me up, today. Even if it was...self-centered.”

“‘Self-centered’ does not necessarily have negative connotations,” said Ren. “But I find it endlessly appealing that you think of it as me doing things _with my brain_.”

“As opposed to what?”

“As opposed to the Force,” said Ren. “It makes rather a large difference, as I think you’ll agree.”

“Well, you’re using your brain to _manipulate_ the Force, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Well, technically yes. But it is not a viewpoint I have encountered before.”

“If it’s constantly all around us and...I don’t know, suffusing the universe,” Hux said, running his thumb lightly over Ren’s knuckles, “I don’t see where you’re _commanding_ it to do anything, you’re...leaning on it in order to be able for _you_ to do those things. It’s your will, I mean. Your…” he searched vaguely for the word. “Impetus. Anyway, I am frankly astonished by the things you can do _with it_ , using your brain.”

Ren blinked at him. 

“What?” Hux squeezed his hand. “Oh, hells, should I not have said that?”

“No. I mean...that’s...not something I have heard expressed, before,” said Ren. “I need to think about it.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. 

“No, really, don’t be, it’s…” He trailed off. “You really think the things I do are astonishing?”

“Oh, for… _yes_ , Ren, I do. Because they are. It’s not as if most people I know can...repair broken bones, or make things fly, or listen to thoughts, or say provoking things inside people’s heads.”

“Or extract information from them without breaking the skin,” said Ren. 

“Or that. It’s a lot more efficient than alternative methods of interrogation, and requires less cleanup afterward,” he said. “Efficiency is to be commended.”

“But you are...pleased, by the things I can do.”

“It’s not for me to be pleased or displeased,” Hux said, “it’s nothing to do with me what you can or cannot do, but _yes_ , Ren.”

“I need to think about this,” he said. 

“By all means. Just...don’t leave? Not yet? Can you think with me here?”

Ren laughed, that surprisingly ordinary laugh. “No. I absolutely cannot think with you here. You wreck my concentration.”

Hux smiled, blinking. “I think that’s the nicest thing anyone has told me in a long time,” he said. And then yawned, hugely. 

“You should sleep,” said Ren. “I will be lectured by a 2-1B unit with mismatched optic scanners and by that particularly sour-faced doctor, if you do not sleep.”

“I would spare you that fate,” Hux said. “Stay. Please. I know you’ve got to be tired too, you were up all night hauling me through snowstorms.”

“I can’t,” said Ren. “It would be...bad, if word got out that I had spent the night in your quarters.”

Hux sighed. “I know. I’m trying not to know. I don’t...I don’t understand what this _is_ , Ren.” He looked up, not sure what he wanted to see. “I don’t know what this is, but I _don’t want it to go away_.”

“Neither do I.” Ren squeezed his hand, and then bent over Hux and kissed his forehead, above his left eyebrow. “I know that much.”

The spot where his lips had brushed felt both hot and cold. Hux was conscious of a kind of terrible yearning _already_ , with Ren still sitting on his bed. _Oh, hells,_ he thought, forgetting to try and do it quietly, _am I going to feel like this every time he goes away, how will I bear it,_ and he could almost see the thought as Ren caught and parsed it on its way. 

_I don’t know,_ Ren said. _I don’t know how I can bear it, either, but…_

 _But we haven’t got a choice,_ Hux finished, with a sigh. _One of the things my father said--_

 _Your father,_ Ren echoed. 

_My father said, among a great many other things:_ one can always do what one must. _It turns out to be true, in my experience._

 _And in mine,_ said Ren. _I have to go, now, because if I do not leave now I will not be able to leave at all. Truly._

His throat was closing, and Hux was dimly grateful that he didn’t have to trust his voice. He kissed Ren’s hand, and let it go, gently. _I know. Thank you._

When he had gone, Hux curled up on his side once more, pulling the covers and the coat over his head--and was profoundly grateful for the depth of his fatigue, and that he did not have to wait long before sleep came.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> illustrated by [kassna](http://kassna.tumblr.com/)!

Always in his memory it came back to white, and black, and red, and urgency. 

White snow, black mountains, red fire in the sky. White armor, black uniforms. Red banners, burning almost as brightly in that bleak landscape as the fire that followed. Blood on the snow, and snow gemming black hair with small and terrible stars. Order and chaos, and chaos unleashed in the name of order, and the dawn of a different day, lit by a new sun.

Hux dreamed: and, dreaming, remembered. He stood on the platform overlooking the massed ranks of troopers and officers in uniform, the parallel H-figures of the TIE/fo starfighters, and for once the cold of Starkiller did not seem to sap his strength but concentrate it, intensify it. He was conscious that a moment like this one did not happen to all but the most fortunate--and those who had worked the hardest to bring it about. Hux had earned every heartbeat of this, every breath, and as he clasped his hands behind his back and stared out at the _neatness_ of it all, any hint of anxiety or apprehension left him: he was soaring, now, on wings he had caused to be built. 

“Today,” he said, and his voice rang out over thousands of heads, echoing from the distant mountains. “Today is the end. The end of a government incapacitated by corruption. The end of an _illegitimate regime_ that _acquiesces to disorder!_ ”

He had them, he could feel it, feel the massed hearts beating in time with his own. “At this very moment, in a system far from here, the New Republic lives and wheezes, staggering onward, depraved and ineffectual and unable in any way to support the citizenry it claims to serve. Meanwhile a host of systems are left to wither and die--without aid, without care, without hope. Drowning in its own decadence, the New Republic ignores them, unaware that these are its final moments.”

In ringing silence, Hux took a breath so deep it felt as if his chest would burst, and now the silence in his mind was overtaken by a swelling orchestral surge as he spoke the final words he had wanted to say for _months_ , now. For years.

“This fierce machine--which _you_ have built, to which _you_ have dedicated your lives and labor and upon which we now stand--will bring a final end to the worthless Senate and its dithering members. To their cherished fleet.” 

Hux was burning so brightly he half-expected to see shadows cast by his own light. “When this day is done,” he shouted, with tears in his eyes, “all the remaining systems _in their hundreds_ will bow to the dictates of the _First Order_. And all will remember this as the last day of the _last_ Republic!”

With the echoes of his words still ringing from the mountainsides around them, Hux turned, and gave the order to fire. 

The light came first--blinding, brilliant, searing, scarlet light--and a few moments later the shock-front reached them, and brought with it the sound. Unimaginable, titanic sound, that shook the air in their lungs and rendered all thought impossible while it was passing; and left them dazed when it subsided to a more bearable, if still astonishing, rumble. Hux and his cohorts in their gleaming black and white watched the red fire climb the sky, reaching outward, moving with deceptive speed through space. 

_This is it_ , he thought, still shaken by the sheer impact of the noise. _There is nothing in the galaxy that will ever again touch this. I have done it. I, me,_ I...

He paused. _No. I have directed it. I have caused it to be done. But_ we _have done this thing, together._

Looking out over the red-lit ranks of his people, Hux was struck breathless by the enormity of his pride--of them, for them, for this thing they had built. _At this time, in this place, I am precisely where I belong._

He woke, the echoes of that astonishing sense of _rightness_ hanging on for a moment before dissipating like smoke. 

Everything still hurt, but more bearably, and his head was clear. Hux sat up, running his hands through his hair, and got out of bed. He needed...air. Or space. 

Shortly thereafter the _Dark Heart_ ’s crew was somewhat surprised to see General Hux in flawless uniform, every hair in place, a walking illustration of the rules, stride onto the bridge. It was general knowledge that he had spent some time in the medbay after the return from Kellan IV, but here he was, perfectly squared away, as if nothing had happened. 

Hux could see it in their eyes, almost _hear_ their reaction--and that made him think of Ren, and _no_ , he was not going to think of Ren. Not just at the moment. He nodded to the officer who had the conn, and stalked over to the big forward viewports. Not as big, or as elegant, as the wall of viewports on the _Finalizer_ , but he could see through the transparisteel just as well, and the blackness of space beyond did not care what ship he rode. 

He clasped his hands behind his back, looking out at that blackness with its glittering scatter of stars, hanging in their seemingly random pattern. Chaos, but only when seen from a macro viewpoint; go in closer, and you would be able to recognize the order of each system, each planet and moon drawn through their measured dance according to the _rules_. If you knew the _rules_ , if you knew the laws governing matter and energy and the equations by which their behavior could be calculated, you could work out...almost anything. Given sufficient time. You had to know the rules, Hux thought, wanting to rest his forehead against the cold transparisteel, not letting himself. Because they _were_ the rules. 

There were so many rules. 

He remembered a lifetime ago, as a young child, standing in his father’s study on Arkanis. The Commandant’s windows looked out over the Academy grounds, where a couple of squads of miserable cadets were doing jumping-jacks in the endless grey drizzle. In a few years that would have been Hux down there in the mud, cursing Arkanis’s wretched weather to the nether hells, had the Empire not fallen; but at the time he looked down at the cadets with awe. They were so tall and strong and tireless.

Brendol Hux had been in a rare talkative--rather than lecturing--mood that day, and if much of what he was saying went over the younger Hux’s head, some of it sank in. 

“The Alliance is founded on a fundamental misunderstanding,” he said. “These lofty ideals of freedom and truth and justice and so on sound all very well, but you will find that when you get right down to it, they are not actually what most people want.”

“What do they want?” 

“Most people,” said Commandant Hux, “simply want the mass-trans system to run on time, the price of staple foods to remain steady, and _not to be asked any difficult questions._ That is where we come in.”

“How, sir?”

“We are the ones who are asked the difficult questions; and we answer them.” He nodded to the view of the sprawling Academy complex. “ _How_ does one ensure the mass-trans system runs on time? What factors must be taken into account to make that possible? How can one limit fluctuations in the price of consumables when unpredictable variables such as failed harvests affect the supply? Who does the _thinking_ behind everything that is taken for granted by ordinary people living ordinary lives? Who is responsible for creating--and _maintaining_ \--order?”

“The Empire,” Hux said.

“The Empire. Remember that. It is a responsibility, to govern the galaxy. To organize it; to bring leadership and rule to the disordered; to administrate and control, no matter what. It is our responsibility because we know, we are _capable_ of knowing, what is best for people.”

He had paused, for a moment, looking down at Hux. The strange conversational mood passed, like a cloud-shadow before the wind, and he began to discuss Hux’s performance on a series of recent exams. But the memory of that brief conversation had never quite left Hux, and even when the cracks began to show in the Empire and its defeat began to seem no longer impossible, he never forgot Commandant Hux saying _The Alliance is founded on a fundamental misunderstanding_. Brotherhood and freedom and all the rest of it were all very well, but they did not keep atmo in and vacuum out, and you could not feed anyone with ideals no matter how fervently they were held. 

It had not come as a surprise to Hux that following the Galactic Concordance and the establishment of what they chose to term the New Republic, _order_ did not naturally develop. It could not; the universe tended toward entropy, not away from it; every process occurring in nature increased the sum of entropy for all participants. Unless work was done. And the thirty years that had passed since Jakku did not illustrate a remarkable propensity on the part of the Republic to perform coordinated, organized, efficient _work_.

The remnants of the Empire that had retreated into the Unknown Regions watched the measure of the degree of this particular system’s disorder increase; and soon the beginnings of a new organization arose. One that would _provide_ the necessary leadership and government, _do what must be done_. And in that organization Hux had grown up with a singleminded purpose, a simple code and measure. He was respected not only because of his father’s illustrious career, but for his own work, drive, and talent--which he applied so consistently and so well that he’d reached general rank by his early thirties, a remarkable achievement even in the ambitious First Order. 

So many rules. 

But he was beginning to perceive--or imagine he perceived, which came to the same thing--a small but very vital incongruity between the First Order’s vision for the galaxy _and what was being done to implement it._ He remembered saying it to Ren, on the _Finalizer_ ’s bridge: _careful that you do not let your personal interests interfere with orders from Supreme Leader Snoke_. Only now it was not Ren he wished to tell. 

Hux remembered it, vividly, before everything had fallen apart: Snoke, ordering him to target not just D’Qar but the entire Ileenium system. He had been taken aback, which was not a common occurrence for Hux. 

_The system?_ he had said. _Supreme Leader, according to the most recent galographics, at least two and possibly three habitable worlds circle Ileenium. Following the destruction of the Hosnian worlds, would it not be worthwhile simply to destroy their base and claim the remainder for the Order? We will have the location of the base within a matter of hours and--_

Snoke had interrupted him, which was also not a common occurrence. Neither was Hux actually questioning orders, for that matter. A faint alarm telltale lit up in the back of his mind.

_We cannot wait_ , said the whispery, over-enunciated voice, more quickly and intensely than Hux could remember ever hearing it before. _Not even for hours. Hours that may permit as little as one ship to depart with the information that will allow them to find Skywalker. That would be one ship too many. The more time we give them, the more likely the chance, however slight, that they will find Skywalker and convince him to return to challenge our power. As soon as the weapon is fully charged, I want the entire Ileenium system destroyed._

More and more alarms had been flashing in Hux’s mind, like the cacophony of warning bells and lights in a malfunctioning cockpit. He had actually drawn breath to speak when Ren, beside him, did so instead.

_No, Supreme Leader, I can get the map from the girl, and that will be the end of it. I just need your guidance._

Snoke’s huge ghostly face had twisted in a sneer, leaning down toward them. _And you promised me when it came to destroying the Resistance you would not fail me_ , he said, and Hux could feel Ren’s wince without even looking at him. _Who knows if copies of the map have already been made and sent out of the system, to other, minor Resistance outposts? But those who are most aware of its significance will all likely be gathered at their main base. Destroy that, destroy them, and we may at least feel a little more confident that the way to Skywalker is eradicated. Even if copies have been made and exported, the annihilation of their leadership will give pause to any survivors who might dare to contemplate further resistance to us. For that reason alone I would order the destruction of the system, even if there was no assurance it would also put an end to this accursed map._

Now a master caution warning was going off in Hux’s brain. This didn’t make _sense_. But the rules were the rules, and Hux knew them all, and so despite the jangle of uncertainty he had done his job, done what he was _for_ , to the best of his ability. 

And Starkiller had died. And now everything was different, everything he had worked for, everything he had been meant to achieve and accomplish, all that he _was_ had been taken away--leaving Hux with only questions and uncertainties. It would have been so much easier had he been able to convince himself the whole mess was solely his own fault. That was a modality he was used to: if a thing was his fault, then it was not the fault of a system, and the system did not need to be reevaluated for its inherent stability: _he_ simply needed to note the mistake and refrain from making it again. Human error was so much easier to accept than equipment failure. But Hux could not make it stick, no matter how hard he tried to trace the end back to a sole decision he had _personally_ chosen to make or not make, a deed of his own volition which he had done or failed to do. It had been beyond his control, painful as that was to acknowledge, and so the reasons behind their spectacular defeat were still to be finally determined. 

Snoke’s insistence. Snoke’s...paranoia, about this map, about Skywalker. How could Skywalker--one aging Jedi, perhaps accompanied by a scavenger girl from Jakku--possibly offer Snoke _that level_ of threat? And the...not-quite-logical insistence: destroy D’Qar before copies could be made and distributed, but even if that had already happened, destroy D’Qar _anyway_ , to...what, make a point? Hux felt the point had been abundantly made with the erasure of the Hosnian system. That represented...probably the most impressive and complete single demonstration of force and firepower the galaxy had ever seen, and hot pride rose again inside him at the thought, just for a moment. 

It was because he did not understand Snoke’s angle on the girl, the Force-sensitive girl, and Skywalker. Hux began to pace, yet again absently wishing the _Dark Heart_ were a bigger ship every time he had to stop and turn back the other way. He felt considerably better having narrowed down the point at which he was missing the key information. Everything _else_ was still miserably confusing, but at least he recognized now what he did not know. 

Ren had said--Hux couldn’t stop a shiver at the thought of Ren, and fought for objectivity--that Snoke had had...hopes for him, because he contained both the dark and light sides of the Force. Which hopes were apparently now dashed. Was that because of Ren’s act on the bridge, his attempt to avoid Vader’s sentimental mistake? Had that been ordered by Snoke, or was it entirely a personal choice made by Ren, and if so, had it been _against_ Snoke’s wishes? What had Ren _said_ about his journey to the dark side, anyway? Hux couldn’t remember the details; they’d both had quite a lot of brandy by that point. 

_Are you there?_ he thought, now, deliberately, hands clasped tightly enough behind his back that the knuckles were white under his gloves. 

_Mm,_ said Ren, his voice unreadable. _You’ve certainly been...thinking._

Hux felt too old and tired to mind the realization that he should have known Ren would overhear his meditations. _It’s a thing I do sometimes._

_I have been thinking, as well._

_Snoke,_ Hux thought. _It’s Snoke, isn’t it. That’s what’s missing. The missing piece._

_Yes,_ said Ren. 

_What did he say to you?_

_Do you really want to know?_

_Yes._

Suddenly, instead of Kylo Ren’s voice in his head, it was Snoke’s: _exactly_ Snoke’s, so exactly that Hux had to put effort into not looking wildly around to see if Snoke was actually present and observing him. _I have never had a student with such promise--before you_ , said the whispery voice.

Ren, replying: _It is your teachings which make me strong, Supreme Leader._

Hux could not entirely suppress an eyeroll at that, but he made the effort. _It is far more than that,_ Snoke went on. _It is where you are from. What you are made of. The dark side...and the light. The finest sculptor cannot fashion a masterpiece from poor materials. He must have something pure, something strong, something unbreakable, with which to work. I have--you._

The voice stopped, and Ren’s mental touch was flooded by such bitter black amusement it tightened Hux’s throat, made him cough. _He had--me. Lucky him. There’s more,_ Ren said, in his own voice.

_Go on, then._

The playback of Snoke continued. _Kylo Ren, I watched the Galactic Empire rise, and then fall. The gullible prattle on about the triumph of truth and justice, of individualism and free will. As if such things were solid and real instead of simple subjective judgments. The historians have it all wrong. It was neither poor strategy nor arrogance that brought down the Empire. You know too well what did._

_Sentiment,_ Ren replied. 

_Yes. Such a simple thing. Such a foolish error in judgment._

Hux had stopped pacing, and was staring out at the stars without seeing any of them, entirely focused on the conversation that had just taken place inside his head. Almost all of what Snoke had said to Ren fit reasonably well with his own understanding of Snoke’s priorities and long-term vision, and yet he was still missing something. Hux did not entirely agree with the Supreme Leader regarding the decline and fall of the Galactic Empire: he thought there had been certain other factors in play, such as corruption in the command hierarchy and lack of effective training rendering their armed forces less prepared and efficient than might be desired. The idea that an entire empire could fall based on one unpremeditated, emotionally driven act was...not one Hux currently wished to examine terribly closely. 

_He goes on about your particular suitability because of your, what, dual nature?_ he thought. _Dark and light together. But why do I get the strong impression it’s the dark he wants?_

_The dark side is not stronger,_ Ren said. _But it is more...applicable, to Snoke’s purposes. It may help if you think of alloys: a slight amount of one metal added to another makes a third which may be much stronger than either of its individual components._

Hux leaned against the viewport, looking out. _And you wanted to extinguish the light._

_It is...painful. The pull from opposing sides._

That had not occurred to him. _It hurts?_

_Yes. All the time._

_Is there anything that can be done?_

_It seems that being near you sometimes makes it better,_ Ren said, and Hux shivered. _And sometimes it makes it...very much worse._

Something cold and heavy dropped into the pit of his stomach. _Oh,_ he said, inadequately. _I. I didn’t know. I’m sorry._

_Of course you didn’t know. I’m telling you._

Hux turned from the view of the stars and scanned the bridge, where everybody was doing a suspiciously earnest job of performing their tasks, and checked the chrono on a console. _I have a little while left before my first meetings are scheduled_ , he thought. _Is now...a time when having me around would help, or exactly the opposite?_

_Exactly the opposite, I’m afraid,_ Ren said, sounding unhappy about it. _Don’t worry, I’m fine, and I have things I need to do. These...phases...don’t seem to last very long, I am coming to understand._

_Fair enough,_ Hux thought, trying not to mind, because that was absurd, and trying not to notice that he was doing so, because that was also absurd. It was for the best, anyway: he too had a lot of actual work to do at the moment. For his job. That was why he was here, to do his _job_. Even if he was no longer entirely confident in the leadership direction being taken by his commanding officer, and even if that felt rather as Starkiller’s snowy terrain had felt under his boots while the planet shook in its death throes, what he was here for was _doing the job in front of him_. To the best of his abilities. 

Ren, in his head: _I’m sorry._

_I know_ , Hux thought. _So am I. I don’t...think either of us ever imagined this was going to be_ easy, _Ren. But as I said, I_ don’t _want it to go away._

_Neither do I_ , Ren said, and was silent. 

He thought of Brendol Hux, all those years ago on Arkanis: _we are the ones who are asked the difficult questions, and we answer them._ There had to be a way to...deal with this. All of this. All the layers and shells and complexities of this: him, and Ren, and a universe that no longer made all the sense it ought. There _had_ to be a way, and that meant it was there to be found, _and he would find it_. 

A line from something he had read years ago came back to Hux, with the same gliding eerie recall as the scrawled letters on the fresher stall, _all that you love will be carried away_. This other line had been part of some long and largely incomprehensible poem he could not now for the life of him imagine why he had been reading, but it too had stuck with him, and for no logical reason he felt disproportionately cheered up thinking of it now. _For whatsoever from one place doth fall_ , it had read, _is, with the tide, unto another brought: for there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought._

He ached, physically, and now there was this other new pain that did not seem to be entirely somatic but directly correlated to _not being near Kylo Ren_ , and he wasn’t sure, not close to being absolutely sure, that where Snoke was taking the First Order was the direction in which it ought to go. But Hux thought if he had lost that surety, that peace of mind, with the death of Starkiller, he had gained something nonetheless. He thought of ice shattering and spalling away from something that had slept, frozen, for years; thought of the astonishing, breathtaking felicity of _nearness_ , of touch; thought about white stars in blackness, snowflakes caught in dark waves of hair, chaos resolving to order as a larger, underlying structure was made clear. Of frozen numbness giving way, at last, at _last_ , to pain, and beyond the pain a promise of something better than blind certainty or conviction: answers, that might be found. If sought. 

He stood up straight, pulling the coat tighter around his shoulders, and with it the comfortingly familiar weight of responsibility he had been neglecting settled back into his mind. All around him the ship’s systems and crew were busy at their assigned tasks, and if he concentrated he could imagine his awareness expanding, spreading through corridors and conduits, through the tiny contained hell of the power reactor, the glow of the sublight ion engines, through the coiled-tight lethal power of the armament. Through the spaces inhabited by people, who walked and talked and breathed and lived. One of whom was Kylo Ren. 

He closed his eyes, and when he opened them the _Dark Heart_ was truly _his_ , at last: a small world, under his control, and for which he was responsible. 

General Hux settled in to work. 

~~~~~

_Blood on the snow, and snow gemming black hair with small and terrible stars. Order and chaos, and chaos unleashed in the name of order, and the dawn of a different day, lit by a new sun._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hux's speech at the rally, and his and Ren's conversations with Snoke, are borrowed directly from the official _TFA_ novelization by Alan Dean Foster. I set them in the text with very few changes. 
> 
> _For whatsoever from one place doth fall_  
>  _Is with the tide unto another brought:_  
>  _for there is nothing lost, that can be found, if sought_
> 
> is from Book 5, Canto II of Edmund Spenser's _The Faerie Queene_ , and probably most famous in pop culture for being read by Alan Rickman to Kate Winslet in _Sense and Sensibility_. I think the version Rickman actually recites has "but" in it: there is nothing lost, but can be found, if sought. All the other versions of the text I've encountered have "that" in place of "but," and I suspect the change was made for the sake of effective clarity.
> 
> This is the ending of the first episode of a story about these two. I don't know how many more there will be; but _all that you love will be carried away_ is now officially a series. I want to thank everyone who has read this thing and given me such fantastic and supportive comments, and particularly [byzantienne](http://archiveofourown.org/users/byzantienne), whose fault, in part, this is. Thanks also to [givenclarity](http://givenclarity.tumblr.com) and [kassna](http://kassna.tumblr.com) who have made such _beautiful_ illustrations to go with this (also go check out [FlukeOfFate](http://archiveofourown.org/users/FlukeOfFate/pseuds/FlukeOfFate)'s amazing artwork in the third fic of this series!). You guys RULE. 
> 
> also to everyone who's said OH NO I SHIP IT NOW: there's room down here in Kylux hell for _all_ of us, give in to your feelings. it is inevitable. it is _your destiny_.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is, of course, borrowed from the Stephen King short story of the same name, in which it is one of many bathroom-stall graffiti collected over a lifetime of traveling.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [that you love (the high hawk season remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5942401) by [byzantienne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/byzantienne/pseuds/byzantienne)




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